Ria Higgins

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Eileen Cooper: ‘Nights at the Circus’

Eileen Cooper is known for addressing the female identity in her paintings and printmaking. She is also known for mixing everyday realism with a wild imagination, a primitive and playful style and her affinity for bold colours. It seems fitting, then, that the Folio Society should commission her to create the illustrations for a new edition of Angela Carter’s inspiring 1984 novel, Nights at the Circus, included in the BBC’s 2019 list of the ‘100 novels that shaped our world’.

Eileen Cooper must have had a ball, not only visualising the female protagonist, Sophie Fevvers, in this novel but bringing her to life. Sophie’s turn-of-the-century backstory is part Dickens, part Hans Christian Anderson, having been left as a baby on the doorstep of an East London brothel, possibly hatched from an egg. By her teens, she was six foot tall and had grown a pair of large wings. Her only hope of fitting into society was to dye her hair peroxide blonde and join a travelling circus where her flying tricks made her an instant star.

To coincide with the book, Mayfair’s Sims Reed Gallery is exhibiting 20 of the works on paper Cooper made for this book, including collages, monoprints and sketches. This is a magical journey full of folklore, myth, madness, romance and intrigue, and Cooper’s bold black lines deftly define the novel’s bunch of extraordinary characters. But the smallest of details are there, too, from our heroine’s eyelashes to the snazzy dollar buckle on the ringmaster’s all-American costume.

The lines in Cooper’s works are powerfully matched by her palette: scarlet reds, russet browns, cherry pinks and fiery oranges. These are all beautifully captured in Little Dancer 1, in which a bemused circus tiger stands over a dancing girl. It is, however, Cooper’s use of blue that lingers the longest and is epitomised in Wings 1. Here we see Sophie’s feathery wings outstretched as she soars above the trees into an expanse of gorgeous turquoise sky, beautifully evoking a sense of infinite freedom.

Cooper never forgets that the pivotal theme of this story is a woman’s flight in all its many forms – escapism, vulnerability, survival, reinvention. In that sense, it is very much a human story and it is Cooper’s delicate portrayal of emotions that is most revealing. In Night Kiss 2, for instance, she captures the incredible tenderness of the moment Sophie finally gives in to her deepest feelings.

While Cooper follows in Angela Carter’s footsteps, this is very much Cooper’s own journey. Carter died in 1992 from lung cancer. She was only 51. But one can’t help but feel that were she still with us today, she would have been overjoyed with Cooper’s response to her seminal work.

Words by Ria Higgins.

Eileen Cooper: Nights at the Circus can be seen at the Sims Reed Gallery, 43A Duke Street, St James’s, London SW1, online (www.gallery.simsreed.com) from March 31-June 18 and in the gallery from April 12-May 14. View the 3D walkthrough here.

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