Valentine Penrose

The first volume devoted to the oeuvre of surrealist poet and artist Valentine Penrose, showcasing leading scholarship that brings her work into dialogue with the contemporary moment.

Artist, poet, traveller and 20th-century surrealist visionary, Valentine Penrose was highly regarded as a poet and artist during her lifetime, but is yet to receive the critical attention given to many of her surrealist peers. Bringing to life the artist in her own right, this is the first English-language book dedicated to Penrose’s genre-defying oeuvre and its poetic quest to understand the shifting world of the 20th century from multiple perspectives.

This volume explores Penrose's accomplished visual and literary work, relating it to her creative, often unconventional, philosophical ideas. It shows how her work emerged from encounters with global cultures and political issues: she travelled widely (frequently solo) through India, the Canary Islands, Africa, and across Europe - protesting against the Spanish Civil War, driving British soldiers during the London Blitz, and stationed in Algiers during the Second World War. The contributors highlight a range of unique motifs throughout Penrose’s work, covering ecology, spiritualism, folklore, mythology, lesbianism, the Gothic, the occult, and life during war. Reflecting on Penrose’s practice during a time of immense global change, the chapters provide insight into the bold practice of a female artist working against patriarchal, heteronormative, and capitalist power structures.

Bringing these unpublished archival materials as well as Penrose’s published works into dialogue with works by better-known artists such as Eileen Agar and Alice Rahon, the volume offers new and creative ways of thinking through feminism, female collaboration, and queerness in surrealism. Introducing a dynamic personality to the modernist canon, it will be a vital addition to studies on British, French, and non-Western surrealisms, and to scholarship on female surrealism.