Paula Rego

A signed, limited edition of Rego's intense and brutal suite of lithographs in dialogue with Brontë's Jane Eyre.

• Paula Rego (Portuguese-English).
• Introduction by Marina Warner.
• London: Enitharmon Editions, 2003.
• Illustrated with frontispiece and 23 additional lithographs, including one foldout. 
• Regular edition of 275 copies, this copy numbered 0/5, apparently out of series.
• Signed by Warner and Rego at colophon.
• Bound in original pictorial boards with navy cloth spine.

Rego's Jane Eyre series is narrower in emotional range than its source inspiration, but fully its equal in depth. Her lithographs thrash with the furious, tortured physicality of women weighed down by pain and humiliation and confinement, the element of fire nearly smothered in wet wool and cold earth. The Portuguese-born artist reported reading Jane Eyre for the first time as an adult, and no childhood nostalgia tempers her vision. Jane Eyre herself appears as she is, not as she seems: a massive presence, rather than the fey fairy elf of Rochester's pickup lines or the meek mouse of conventional illustration. "I don't believe in the existence of little mice," Rego affirmed to The Observer in 2002. "Every mouse has intestines and teeth and they are terrifying, those little mice. Jane Eyre is actually a bit of a rat."