'As a treat to celebrate her first communion, Leonora Carrington was taken to the small local zoo at the English seaside resort of Blackpool. She remembers it partly because it was the first time she had been to a zoo and seen the wild animals who occupied much of her dream time, and partly because it was her mother who was taking her there. This was a rare treat, as the child was usually attended by her nanny. Creatures – actual and fantastic, wild and tame – populate Leonora Carrington's paintings, her sculptures, her stories and novels; she was 'born loving them', and in Mexico she responded with recognition to the Indian belief that each of us possesses an animal – nahual – soul as well as a human one. In everybody, she says, there is an 'inner bestiary'.

When she was small, she was frightened of ghosts but not at all afraid of the 'very funny' visions she sometimes had, in which a wild tortoise would sometimes cross her path or 'an absolutely huge cat' would appear 'sitting in a disused dog kennel.' She began writing and illustrating stories very young, when she was around four years old. She makes light of her gifts and precociousness – 'all children do it.'

The bestiary continued to inhabit her, and all of the animals within, the horse predominates, and next to the horse, the hyena . . . The hyena embodies the young woman's sex and fertility, the horse her dynamism and speed and sovereignty. 'A horse gets mixed up with one's body…it gives energy and power,' Leonora says. 'I used to think I could turn myself into a horse.' She remembers how her mother told her stories about Jack Frost, the folk spirit of winter, who knew powerful magic, and how subsequently she, Leonora, pestered the sub-postmistress in the village, through whom telephone calls had to be placed in those days, with requests to put her through to Jack Frost, who 'would help change her into a horse.'

Leonora and her mother were the only members of the family to ride (To her shame today, she used to go hunting too). The family were brought up in a Lancashire mansion called Crookhey Hall, and though they left it in 1927, when she was a child of ten, for a somewhat less magnificent establishment, it is Crookhey Hall with its gardeners and huntsmen and maids and 'lavatory Gothic architecture' (Leonora's phrase) which has provided the principal stuff of Carrington's art.'

This is an abridged extract from Marina Warner's Introduction to Leonora Carrington, /The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below/. Trans. Katherine Talbot and Marina Warner (New York: E.P.Dutton, 1988, and London: Virago, 1989). Reproduced by kind permission of the author.