Medea's Charms Selected Shorter Writing

Margaret Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988), is best remembered as the British surrealist artist who was ejected from the London surrealist group because of her interest in the occult. Today her paintings hang in national and regional galleries and command ever increasing prices at auction, but during her lifetime she had greater success as a writer. She published four full-length prose works, a slim volume of poetry, and a small collection of poems and short stories. Her novel, Goose of Hermogenes (1961) and her two travelogues, The Crying of the Wind: Ireland (1955) and The Living Stones: Cornwall (1957) are in print, having been reissued recently by Peter Owen Publishers. Colquhoun was a prolific writer of essays, poetry and short stories. Yet in complete contrast to the long works, her shorter writings have almost totally disappeared from view. For the most part they were published in literary periodicals or hermetic journals with a small print run and limited circulation. This means that their obscurity is matched by their unavailability. Today, most of Colquhoun's shorter writings can only be accessed by the determined visitor to archives and academic libraries. In consequence, the reader who comes to her work aware only of her reputation as a surrealist artist or as the author of a gothic novel and mystical travelogues will be surprised at the scope of her writings. Complimenting her poetry and shorts stories, the subjects of her essays range from the mundane to the bizarre. They include hermetic texts for both the novice and the advanced practitioner, writings on art, folklore, autobiography and book reviews. In Medea's Charms, Colquhoun scholar Richard Shillitoe corrects this imbalance, his accessible and sensitive style unlocking the secrets of this remarkable woman and guiding the reader through the extraordinary imagination that lies at the heart of Colquhoun's genius. Running through the book is the question: did her inspiration come from within - her own creative unconscious - or from without - the world of spirits and elementals? The book also demonstrates for the first time the extent to which Colquhoun used painting to illuminate her writings. The close interplay between word and image is brought home by the inclusion of a striking selection of her paintings, some of which are reproduced here for the first time.