The artist and writer is celebrated in a new UK show – but why was a woman of such talent so little known in her lifetime, asks her cousin?

Almost 20 years ago I travelled 5,000 miles to meet my father’s cousin, who had been estranged from our family for 70 years. Back then, Leonora Carrington – though feted in her adoptive country, Mexico – was barely known in her native Britain. She had been as neglected by the art world in general as by her country, and our family.

Two decades on, the story is very different. In April this year, one of her paintings – Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) – was sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $28.5m, making her the highest-selling female artist in British history. Over the last few years, shows of her work have been held across the world: in Madrid and Copenhagen, Dublin and Mexico City, and at Tate Liverpool. Next month an exhibition at Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, Sussex, will celebrate her broader work, exploring her output beyond the dream-like canvases of her paintings and the surreal fictional writing for which she is now best known. Because as well as being a painter and writer, Carrington was also a sculptor, a creator of tapestries and jewellery, a maker of lithographs, a playwright and a designer of stage sets and theatre costumes. The Sussex show will include examples of these works, many of which have never been seen before in the UK.