Leonora Carrington’s surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet (written sometime in the 1950s but not published until 1974)¹ is at once a parodic quest narrative, a fictionalised transposition of Robert Graves’s 1948 study The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (which Carrington described as ‘the 2 greatest revelation’ of her life²) and a utopian vision of an ethics of being and knowing. Narrated by its whimsical, anecdote-prone and near-deaf protagonist, the ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby, the novel chronicles six elderly women’s search for the Holy Grail in a nursing home for the aged. As Jonathan P. Eburne has observed,...