White Rabbits/Down Below

by Leonora Carrington

In 1940, Leonora Carrington - a twenty-two-year-old British-born Surrealist artist - was persuaded to flee France and the advancing German army for Spain. Already suffering from a psychotic break occasioned by the arrest of her lover by the Nazi authorities, she was soon confined to a mental institution, where she was subjected to sadistic treatment under the guise of medical care. In her memoir, Down Below, she describes her experiences with an anthropologist's precision and an artist's sense of the fantastic.

This volume also includes a selection of Carrington's best stories from across her lifetime, functioning as companion pieces to her surrealist-inflected non-fiction. They include 'The Debutante', in which a young woman, wishing to avoid a ball in her honour, swaps places with a hyena; 'White Rabbits', which sees a friendly neighbour come by to ask for spare decomposing meat; and 'My Flannel Knickers', in which a woman has sainthood forced upon her.

Genres: Nonfiction, Short Stories

Kindle Edition

Published July 9, 2026

About the author

Leonora Carrington was an English-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City, and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Mexico during the 1970s.

Reviews

[Janelle]

This book contains a selection of short stories and Down Below, a sort of memoir of Carrington’s brutal experiences in an insane asylum in Spain after fleeing France in 1940. The interesting thing is the memoir is more surreal and horrifying than the stories making this a strange read. The short stories are full of vivid and weird imagery, often finishing just as they seem to be taking off.

[Sofi]

as this book consists of two parts, a surrealist short story collection and a sort of memoir of her time in an asylum, I also have to write two short reviews.

leonora carrington is the original surrealist weird girl short stories writer. all of her fantastic, weird and random short stories seem to be the blue print for all the other weird girl short story collections I've read the last few years, for example by ottessa moshfegh or bora chung. sometimes unfinished, sometimes not fully edited, leonora tells mystical tales of odd creatures bizarre events that I cannot stop thinking about. with surrealist literature, searching for a deeper meaning often turns out to be a lost cause. but her texts lingered so long with me, that I sensed the presence of a message like a shadow under moving water. especially the texts "the debutante", "white rabbits", "cast down by sadness", and "the neutral man" stood out to me.

throughout all the texts I sense a certain kind of loneliness, the inability to fit in and a very peculiar way of viewing the world. detailed and twisted observations mixed with fantastic visions and ideas. I have never read anything similar before.

in "down below" we follow leonora through a retelling of her mental breakdown after max ernst's arrest, her escape to the west and her incarceration in a mental institution in spain. in this short memoir we experience leonora's descend into madness with her, as she shares the smallest details of her otherworldly convictions. but in this story leonora is not only the manic pixie dream girl that her horoscope writing and surrealist paintings allude to. she is a deeply traumatized, lonely and confused woman and the system that what supposed to protect her during her mental episode, failed and sadistically abused her.

the clarity of the glimpse into her mentally unwell thoughts surprised me. everything she describes seems to make sense at some point and then again the reader is reminded of the state she is currently in.

all in all, this is the story of a woman that lost and regained her agency, her fight for freedom and autonomy and her journey in and out of madness.

in her words:

"I don't accept your force, the power of any of you, against me. I want my freedom to act and think... I don't belong to you."

[Tina]

What an extraordinary novella. Carrington was born into a super rich family in England in 1917 and was to become an important figure in the surrealist movement in the 1930s. She lived most of her life in Mexico City where she wrote and painted. This novella contains some of her stories. Weird, wonderful and totally surreal and I zipped through it in a couple of hours.

The longest part is the transcript of an interview she did in 1987, telling of her appalling sadistic treatment when put into a Spanish asylum. She had suffered a breakdown after her lover Max Ernst left her, fleeing the Nazis, with another woman. She was stuck in Paris in terror of the Nazis. (The notion of being “stuck” comes up in her messianic delusions and halucinations) She managed to escape with a friend to Spain but here she suffered two traumatic episodes. She suffered delusions and paralysing anxiety and was institutionalised.

I think to even slightly understand her stories the reader needs to know some of her biography. She relates her experience in the asylum with a sort of dry wit and not a shred of self pity. I was intrigued by the author herself and this book.

I recommend this to anyone who wants to immerse themselves in a surreal imagination. The short stories are sometimes shocking sometimes funny in an off beat way.

I have one criticism in that the short stories are not titled so although there is a contents page at the beginning, with page numbers, it wasn’t too helpful for reading on a kindle, and there was no obvious separation of the stories; the formatting was wrong. I assume all this will be corrected before publication.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC in return for my honest review.

[Cia K.]

Was completely fascinated by her memoir and then her stories were like her paintings; absurd and weird but fantastic all the same

[Roman Clodia]

Ring for your maid, and when she comes in we'll pounce upon her and tear off her face. I'll wear her face tonight instead of mine.

This is an ideal volume for new readers of Leonora Carrington comprising as it does a selection of her surrealist stories together with her autobiographical Down Below.

The continuities between the two modes of writing are startling and revealing: 'by enabling me to put on and to take off at will the mask which will be my shield against the hostility of Conformism' in Down Below is just one example of intratextual connections with the stories, notably, in this case, with 'The Debutante' where a hyena creates a 'mask' from a human face in order to take her place at a ball. There is, too, a confession of fictionalizing in the autobiography: 'I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete, for lack of some details which I cannot conjure up today' - though the reason for the lack of recall is because the author was being forcibly restrained and pacified through the use of drugs in a sanatorium.

What links both sets of texts is not just the surrealist imagination but a concern with refusing to conform with conventions, often built around patriarchy. Carrington puts an unerring finger on the way WW2 was itself a manifestation of extreme masculinity with fascism's patriarchal overtones, drawing on long-held connections between the idea of 'father of the country' and a father as head of the family and household: 'to me Van Ghent was my father, my enemy, and the enemy of mankind', referring to a man with Nazi connections.

What little I know about Carrington illuminates the stories too as they rebel against the idea of a debutante's coming out ball - a social ritual that puts young women on display in order for them to be situated in the marriage market - and even against the leader of the Church of Saint Alexander, a stand-in for organised (Christian?) religion.

Whatever the politicised subtext, what is immediately striking about the short stories is the gloriously strange and lush images: 'her dressing gown was made of live bats sewn together by their wings: the way they fluttered, one would have thought they didn't much like it'.

It feels especially apposite for Leonora Carrington to be attracting renewed attention in our current moment: her concerns with gender, with power, with divergent neurological states, even her breaking down of the species barriers between human and animal feel absolutely potent in 2026.

Even her 'madness' cannot be easily untangled from the historical context of the Second World War and 'the moment when Max was taken away to a concentration camp for the second time'. When so many contemporary novels are concerned with female rage and gendered issues of mutedness, Carrington had already made this connection: 'But we never talked about this time [when she was incarcerated]. It's the sort of thing English people of that generation didn't discuss... What is terrible is that one's anger is stifled.' In the short stories that anger may be displaced onto animals but the savagery of the hyena is replicated across the texts: 'the door crashed open and all the beasts of the forest entered crying, 'Kill him, kill him'.

Many thanks to Penguin for an ARC via NetGalley

[Becky]

This new publication contains a selection of surreal short stories, followed by Carrington's account of her incarceration in a mental institution following a breakdown caused by her lover, Max Ernst, being arrested by the Nazis. It is hard to categorise: partly horror, fully surreal, frequently grotesque, occasionally absurdly, darkly funny. It is not an easy or pleasant read, but it is graphic and vital.

In 1940 Carrington , aged 22, fled to Spain amidst World War Two. Following a breakdown she was placed in a mental institution, facing sadistic treatment, including being tied naked to a hospital bed and injected with cardiazol, a drug that causes strong, painful convulsions that were thought at the time to help treat psychosis. Her account is both vivid and focused, written after the event based on her disturbed yet very real memories. "Down below" was a location in the institution that became her goal, an imagined nirvana. The account is less than 100 pages long but opens up a world of horror and fear. The surreal elements may induce readers to think that it isn't all true. I believe that would be a wrong conclusion; there is an immediacy and detail to get recollections that speaks of truth. 

The short stories that preceed DOWN BELOW in this edition are very clearly not true. A girl swaps places with a hyena to avoid attending her own debutante ball; an old couple keep a house full of meat-eating rabbits and entice a neighbour to bring them supplies; a beautiful woman wrestles with the moon. They feel like the story versions of Carrington's paintings, inexplicable, illogical, full of strange, grotesque beauty and colour. 

I read this in short bursts, unable to cope with more. It is extremely difficult to see someone's pain laid out so clearly. This isn't self-conscious "weird girl lit" (which I hate), it is straight from the mind of one of the great surrealist artists and it is based on a deep appreciation of how surrealism can offer a sharp lens for reality. I still cannot decide on whether the short stories should come before or after her account of her incarceration - maybe the set the scene but they also risk diminishing the feeling of it being real, a stark contrast to imagined fictions. 

I would recommend this book to lovers of surrealism, those interested in the history of mental health, especially in relation to the treatment of women, and those looking for stories that move the mind away from cliché and tradition. It isn't for everyone, but I'm very glad it is being made available for those who will appreciate it.

[Rachel Axton]

This collection contains a number of Carrington's short stories along with her memoir 'Down Below'. I will start with the short stories, which I think follow chronologically from when she wrote / published them. The first ones are all 1937-38, when she was 20. Many are written in 1st person, but the narrator can change during a story. I also found that her central characters were often quite innocent, in that they do not fully understand what is occurring, but are simply recalling what they see. They are also curious and often a little bold which is the catalyst for moving the stories along. I enjoyed this style, it is playful and very much in keeping with a fairy tale format.

The first is 'The Debutante'. It only runs for a few pages, and is a surreal story of a young woman who befriends a hyena at the zoo, and then in a weird gothic and grotesque sort of twist has the hyena impersonate her at her Debutante ball. It is dark and disturbing in a comic sort of way.

The second story 'The Oval Lady' is equally mysterious, as the narrator's story tips fantastically into folk lore full of twists and turns. I especially liked this story and the beautiful imagery of playful horses in the snow.

Her writing is gorgeous and full of imagery. There are several repeating themes such as birds, bats, and horses. All vivid and fantastic.

The second part of the book is given to 'Down Below', Leonora's memoir of the time she spent in the asylum, starting from shortly after Max Ernst's imprisonment. Rather than a memoir that she has penned, it is what she said in an interview and it makes for an interesting read. It is clear right from the start that she seems to be telling the story faithfully as she recalls it, but also that she is incredibly unreliable and her beliefs are beyond this realm. I found it fascinating and painful.

Absorbing! So glad I read this little collection!

[TheNovelNomad]

This is less a book you read than one you surrender to—strange, luminous, unsettling, and utterly singular.

What makes this collection so remarkable is how seamlessly the surreal and the brutally real sit beside one another. In Down Below, Leonora Carrington writes about psychological collapse, confinement, and dehumanizing treatment with astonishing clarity—never losing her sharpness, never surrendering her imagination. There is precision in her observations, but also something wilder beneath them: a refusal to let language be tamed by convention, even when describing profound suffering.

That tension—between lucidity and dream, horror and absurdity—is what makes her work so arresting.

And then there are the stories: gloriously strange, mischievous, grotesque, and quietly rebellious. Carrington writes the bizarre with such confidence that impossible things feel entirely natural. Animals become mirrors, social rituals become grotesque theatre, and ordinary domesticity bends into something uncanny and darkly funny. Beneath the surrealism is a fierce intelligence interrogating power, conformity, womanhood, and the strange performances society asks us to inhabit.

What lingers most is how modern it all feels. Her work speaks so powerfully to conversations around gender, autonomy, rage, identity, and the policing of difference—not as commentary, but as something lived, imagined, and fiercely transformed into art.

There’s richness in every sentence, but never ornament for ornament’s sake. Even at her strangest, Carrington is piercingly purposeful.

Haunting, provocative, and gloriously untamed, this collection feels like stepping into a mind that refused every box it was handed—and built an entirely new language of seeing in response. A startling, unforgettable read.

[Katrina]

As you would expect, the stories featured in White Rabbits are absurd, dark and nightmarishly surreal, laced with rebellion with the occasional added punch of cruelty for good measure.

However, truth can be stranger and darker than fiction. While the stories collected in White Rabbits are disquieting and disturbing, they pale in comparison to Carrington's account of fleeing France for Spain during Germany's invasion. She had already suffered a psychotic break when her lover Max was arrested by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp.

Carrington's troubles sadly did not end there. After being brutally assaulted by soldiers, she was committed to a mental institution and was forced to undergo inhuman and downright evil treatment in the guise of medical care. Horrifically absurd.

This is a perfect introduction to Leonora Carrington for new readers. Certainly, a collection such as this is something that should be dipped into occasionally to ensure the stories lose none of their impact through immediate over-exposure.

Highly recommended.

With thanks to Penguin for the ARC.

[Lucy]

‘White Rabbits/Down Below’ is a book of 2 halves. The first consists of a wonderfully peculiar set of short stories, showcasing Carrington’s surrealist fantasies; the second is a short memoir of her time in a sanatorium and her escape thence.

I most enjoyed the short story ‘White Rabbits’ - in which a neighbour asks for some decaying meat for her pet rabbits - I felt dismayed, delighted, and unnerved by it. She has a gift for making the mundane spectacular, and the surreal believable. I particularly enjoyed the strange mix of cosmic, magical, and religious elements.

Her memoir was both eye-opening and devastating. Descriptions of her depression, delusions, and “treatment” at a sanitarium were startlingly honestly and brutal. I was particularly affected by the line: ‘they all seemed to take pleasure in mystifying [the mystery] around me’ - I wonder how anyone escaped this kind of entrapment, but I’m glad she did.

A revealing account which introduced me to a strong and sympathetic woman. Thank you NetGalley and Penguin for an ARC of this book.

[Ocean]

Thank you to Penguin Press UK and Netgalley for giving me a advanced reader's copy of this book and letting me dive into my first Leonora Carrington.

White Rabbits is a collection of surrealist stories. My heart was beating like a drum as I read these. They're very enigmatic, full of wild animals and magic, it's like a the most beautiful evocative fever dream. I really enjoyed it and would recommend to all fans of Lewis Caroll, fairytales and heavy esoteric imagery.

Down Below is about the author's stay in a sanatorium in Spain during WWII, she was severely mistreated there and the horrors she went through melt with her visions, it was quite the experience to read her recollection. Like being sucked into her great warped mind.

I'm glad I got the chance to explore these texts, they feel so magnetic. Carrington truly has a way with words. Perhaps not a book for everyone as it is a bizarre genre but if you like magical realism, this may be right up your alley!

[harry :p]

a surrealist hellscape which is as ecstatic as it is ekphrastic. i actually am not a big fan of surrealism (i know i’m sorry!!!) but carrington’s surrealist narratives are brilliant in the sense that she creates simplicity out of complex ideas, comfort out of disillusion, logic out of chaos. which targets the heart of what i personally look for in surrealist art. the second part, down below, her memoir, is absolutely heartbreaking, and the dizzying psychedelic way she writes about her trauma is very touching. for example, the way in which she describes her scant possessions in a “sadistic mental institution” as cosmic objects of divine significance: orange pips, a nail buff in the shape of a boat. it’s all quite hard to follow but i gather that this her point, that she doesn’t owe anyone “sense” out of her trauma, that perhaps there is no sense to be made.
3/5 because while she is brilliant, i just really don’t enjoy surrealism to this extent.

[Jen Burrows]

This little book is a lot stranger than it looks. The short stories in White Rabbits are surreal, slippery, and full of that dream‑logic where everything feels meaningful and nonsensical at the same time. They're dark, chaotic and occasionally grotesque.

But it's Down Below that really hit me. Carrington writes about her psychotic break with a kind of terrifying precision - not sensationalised, not romanticised, just brutally honest and disorienting. It's rare to see mental collapse described from the inside with this much clarity; I found myself both deeply moved and deeply unsettled.

It's definitely an unusual read, and an acquired taste for sure, but there's something valuable in how she refuses to tidy up her own mind for the reader. It's messy, frightening, and strangely beautiful.

*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review*

[Ofelia]

The first part containing the short, surrealist, stories really drew me in. Most often when I read short stories they disappear from my mind as soon as I’ve read them - so light they’re not able to leave a footprint. However, almost all of these short stories stood out to me. Spellbinding with a sinister undertone. The Oval Lady, Debutante and The House of Fear being my favourites.

Notwithstanding, commencing the second part of the book my expectations were far from met. It was rambling and uninteresting. It was so bland that I found myself almost unfeeling while reading the things she was subjected to. Great artist, boring personality?

[Beth Younge]

This was my first introduction to Leonora Carrington and her writing. I liked the short stories and enjoy the surrealistic elements that was contained within them. I really enjoyed the 'The Debutante' and 'My Flannel Knickers' the most out of the ones listed in this collection. 'Down Below' was moving and fascinating, and i found that Carrington's writing helped convey her story so well. This book has made me interested in reading more by Carrington as i really liked this collection of work.

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for a honest review

[Ana Catala]

Ok let me explain… me gustó, es lo más extraño que he leído en mi vida (no te imaginas lo raro que va a ser, aun cuando estás previamente advertida de que va a ser r-a-r-o)

Primera parte completamente inquietante, perturbadora, a veces macabra (aunque de muchas maneras, lúcida), es como leer una transcripción de su pintura; segunda parte completamente desgarradora

Sin embargo!!!! A tough read porque es tan aleatorio todo que llega a ser difícil seguirle el hilo, entender la visión

Si te gusta la pintura de Leonora Carrington, TIENES que leerlo

[Katy Wheatley]

A selection of short, surrealist stories by Carrington and a longer novella based on Carrington’s brief sojourn in a mental hospital in Spain at the beginning of WW2. There is a mystery and unknowingness about Carrington in her life, art and writing. This adds to the rich and strange world that Carrington created as an alternative to some of the trauma she experienced and the antidote to a life she didn’t always control. This is a fascinating read.

[char]

love how this was formatted with her short stories first and then her memoir. you ask yourself how she could’ve possibly come up with any of this and then you read her account of the asylum and go ohhhhhhh right okay

she’s a really great writer. I like when I read something and it doesn’t make any sense and i have to read it several times over and maybe even then I still don’t get it because I’m not supposed to. fab!

[archana]

Strangely beautiful and at times slightly frightening. This is an unconventional book with two parts, a half containing short stories and the other half, containing a memoir. The descriptions are vivid and beautiful. It took me a while to get into the book, but once I did, I devoured it! Thank you Netgalley for an ARC in exchange of an honest review.

[Maria]

Largely unpolished but fantastical. Down Under was in occasion absolutely fantastic and sometimes totally confusing: were some of the people actually real or just part of her inner persona's?

[Ro Dab]

Leonora, je t’aime 💖

[Anna]

What a world Leonora Carrington is pulling me into with all of these short stories.
They are so twisted and uncanny and so so smart.
I loved the oppressive atmosphere of all of the settings and (I never thought I would say this but) these was something very funny about the violence of it all, though at times it was a bit too gruesome for my personal taste. It just feels like really entered into a theater of absurdity.
Which that occasionally made things hard to follow, it mostly made for a really fun and thought provoking reading experience.
Down below was a bit tougher for me to get into, because it was such a tone switch from the beginning of this book.
Once the fantastical elements were no longer there and you realize that this is an autobiographical text, everything became a lot more raw and devistating. It was very hard to read about some of the traumatic experiences she went through when they were not wrapped up in any symbolism or playfulness.
I really commend Carrington for allowing us to give a look into what was going on at that time in her life, though at times that could be hard to follow because she literally takes you along with her train of though while in psychosis.
I don't mean to psychoanalyze this story too much, but the way she wrote it down does make it feel like she is has detached herself from the experience (intentionally or unintentionally so).
It was very strange reading about these horrific events from such a seemingly objective and emotionally dry standpoint. As a reader that does make me want to reflect on her coping mechanisms and think about the question if making art can be a sort of therapy (and if that is a good thing or not).
While I am super glad I read down below, it has really given me a better understanding of the context of Leonora Carrington's life, I do think that her fictional stories really were the highlight of this book for me.
It felt like they gave me a better insight into the emotional and creative aspects of Carrington's life than her autobiography.
I can't wait to read 'the hearing trumpet' next.