The work of Kathleen Hale is full of paradox. It is at once deeply familiar and deeply strange, domestic and exotic, comfortable and disconcerting. Her long life spanned a century, but she never settled into tranquility or repetition. Her most famous creation, Orlando the Marmalade Cat, has brought delight to generations of readers, who relive, in revisiting him, their own childhood, yet Orlando himself contains the unexpected. Even as a small child one must have sensed that the exceptional quality of the Orlando books was produced by an exceptional artistic talent. Here we see that talent revealed in its peculiar diversity.

Kathleen Hale told her own story in her excellent autobiography, A Slender Reputation, published in 1994. The book, like the exhibition, holds many surprises. Unconventional, rebellious, industrious and dashingly improvisatory, Hale was a dedicated, indeed unstoppable worker, never content with labels, and for the most part happily confident of her own powers. A precocious gift was spotted early, and she escaped from Manchester High School, via the Art Department of Reading University College, to explore the London of Chelsea, Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury, to sup on plovers' eggs at the Cafe Royal and to dance at night clubs, to meet Epstein and Nina Hamnett and Augustus John, to starve in a bedsitter. She scraped a living, in the best Bohemian tradition, by doing illustrations, dust jackets, posters, odd jobs, a few hours of teaching here and there. She charmed all she met, though some she overwhelmed by her excess of energy. And she worked, seriously, at her art - in the 'twenties she proved herself an excellent draughtswoman, producing drawings on a visit to the French fishing village of Etaples that were much admired by the master draughtsman, John himself.

Her gifts beckoned her in several directions. Drawings, oils, water colours, linocuts, and pictures in metals - all attracted her, and she applied herself to each new technique with the discipline of a craftsman. There was no stopping her. She found new teachers, both formal and informal, learning from Duncan Grant as she learned from the printers in Ipswich who taught her the dauntingly difficult art of lithography. When there was nobody to teach her, she taught herself. An early comment that her work was essentially 'decorative' haunted her, but it provoked more than it deterred. At a period when many women played mistress and model rather than artist, she insisted on her right to work, and she worked professionally through love affairs, marriage and motherhood, through peace and through war.

She is best known for the creation of Orlando, and his popularity has distorted our knowledge of her work. If he had not been such a success - and he became famous not through instant recognition of grateful publishers, but because Hale was shrewd and persistent as well as greatly gifted - would she have worked more in other genres? Painting, she admitted, called on more 'despairs and exultations', and demanded a deeper level of consciousness than Orlando. On the other hand, Orlando himself obsessed her, and drove her onwards to new heights of invention. One can only speculate as to what might have been, as she herself speculated: she suffered, perhaps, from an embarrassment of riches.

Even her light, playful and fantastic work, however, has at times a sinister tone. At first glance her world seems innocently colourful, but not all in it is harmony. There is often a slight menace in the generous curves of a harmless cow, in the decadent petals of a poppy or an iris, in the frills of a curtain, the branches of a tree. The decorative macabre bent of Arthur Rackham and Aubrey Beardsley is no stranger to her. She is drawn to oddities and curiosities, in nature - cacti, lobster, lichens, flowers distorted, flowers slightly unnatural, plants monstrous, caterpillars in combat. Her portraits of children are not sweet: they are sometimes glum or, in her own word, baleful. The prolific diversity of nature, and her delight in it, are at times alarming.

This sense of danger in the natural world found its way into the beautifully observed landscapes of Orlando, which contain decades of observation of both town and city. We think of Hale primarily as a country dweller, and indeed she and Douglas made their family home for many years at rustic Rabley Willow, near Elstree - a house which promptly burned down almost as soon as they retired to a small cottage. But she also knew London intimately. The vegetable market of Covent Garden, the seaside architecture of Aldburgh and the French hotel room where Hale once stayed with the notorious Bohemian hostess, Viva King, are all woven into the Orlando books.

The drawings of Orlando himself, and of his family, are superb. They remain catlike cats, anatomically correct, with cat gestures and cat characters, yet through them Hale wittily satirises human fashions and follies, including the oddities of some of her fellow artists. (It is no surprise to learn that the first job suggested to her, at the age of twelve, was as political cartoonist on a local newspaper.) Revisiting Orlando as adults we find double meanings, hidden references. How many children would or could have known that the Katnapper in Orlando's Silver Wedding was modelled upon the bald, handsome and bisexual artist, Arthur Lett-Haines, with whom Kathleen Hale initiated an affair which in her view saved her marriage? Or that Antonia White's bespectacled second husband, Eric Earnshaw-Smith, was the inspiration for Mr. Cattermole? Were any of us aware of these thrilling and subversive subtexts? I think on one level we must have been. We identified, boys and girls alike, with the naughty tomkitten Tinkle, and condescended to his good sisters Pansy and Blanche, while we admired the ideal father and mother in Orlando and Grace - yet beyond the innocence and safety of this cosy little family we sensed adult excitements, adult possibilities. This was a shifting, enchanted, self-transforming world, a world both adult and childlike and its power over us is as great as it ever was.

Kathleen Hale, in her life, played the brave and dangerous game of trying to balance Reason and Moderation with Magic and Excess. She succeeded triumphantly, and her work glows with the excitement and exhilaration of the challenges she set herself.

With Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines
by James Beechey

In 1917, at the age of nineteen, Kathleen Hale arrived in London, determined to be an artist but with, in her own words, 'only a few shillings in my pocket, my pince-nez delicately chained to one ear, and no qualifications whatsoever for earning a living'. Penniless, callow and ill-equipped for life in the city she may have been, but she had an enviable knack of landing on her feet. Her first good fortune was to find, among her fellow lodgers at the Bayswater branch of the YWCA, Meum Stuart, Jacob Epstein's favourite model, who had taken up temporary residence there while waiting for her divorce to be finalized. Meum Stuart introduced Hale to Epstein's Sunday afternoon tea parties in Chelsea - after a short probation, she graduated from these to his Sunday evening dinners at the Cafe Royal. In this thrilling milieu she was quick to make new friends and discover new patrons. Foremost among these were Augustus John, who employed her as his secretary for sixteen months; Frank Potter, a pupil at the Slade who had painted the murals at the Studio Club in Lower Regent Street where Hale often went to dance, and who became her first lover; and Viva Booth, who as Viva King was later to be one of London's most notorious hostesses. It was Viva Booth who in 1923 took Hale on her first visit to Paris, an expedition of which she had been dreaming since childhood; and it was in Paris that Hale met two painters who were to become her intimate and lifelong friends. They were Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines.

Morris and Haines were Hale's almost exact contemporaries. Morris (the heir to a baronetcy, to which he succeeded in 1947) was a self-taught artist and horticulturalist who was to win considerable acclaim in both fields; Haines (known always as Lett) was also a talented painter, though he subjugated his own career to organizing and promoting that of his friend. Their relationship had begun in November 1918 - perhaps on Armistice night itself - and, though Haines was at the time married, he and Morris immediately set up house together. They were to remain together for the next sixty years, despite various other attachments on both sides - including, at one time, Haines's with Kathleen Hale. After a short stay at Newlyn in Cornwall, in 1920 they transferred their base to Paris, where they were distinctive figures in the expatriate artistic community, mingling with Juan Gris and Fernard Leger, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Nancy Cunard and Ernest Hemmingway.

'I remember them coming gracefully towards us along the Boulevard [Montparnasse] like gazelles,' Hale wrote in A Slender Reputation, the two of them extremely handsome and elegant.' Morris and Haines took their new companions to 'a seedy dive', the Boule de Cidre, which had been a favourite rendezvous of Verlaine and Rimbaud, but which they quickly evacuated when Haines got wind that a gang of Apaches, spoiling for a fight, were expected; and thence to the Lapin Agile in Montmartre, in the previous century a well-known haunt of the Impressionists. This was the authentic taste of Paris that Hale craved. Her acquaintance at this time with Morris and Haines was brief; but when three years later - by now married to Douglas McClean, a young doctor working in medical research - she was living in John Street in Bloomsbury, she was delighted to discover that they had returned to London and taken a large studio around the corner in Great Ormond Street. Here too they provided Hale with boisterous entertainment, regularly inviting her to their spectacular and much talked-about parties.

In London, Morris basked in artistic as well as social success. He joined the London Group and was proposed by Ben Nicholson for membership of the Seven and Five Society; he exhibited at Tooth's and the Leicester Galleries and at the Venice Biennale; he won praise from R.H. Wilenski and Roger Fry. Hale, meanwhile, was enjoying her own, more modest, achievements. She first came to notice with a series of highly accomplished pencil drawings of fishermen's wives and children, very much in the manner of her mentor Augustus John, made during visit in 1920 with Frank Potter to the Normandy fishing port of Etaples: these she exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery and with the New English Art Club, and several were reproduced in the Studio and Drawing and Design. During her early years in London, she lived a hand-to-mouth existence, flitting from one temporary job to another - colouring maps for the Ministry of Food, driving wagons in the Land Army, collecting debts for a window-cleaner and working as an extra in the films - and moving lodging-houses as often as she changed employment (though gravitating always towards Soho and Fitzrovia). She had few opportunities to paint in oils, and probably could not have afforded to, but this was not altogether a hindrance: it forced her to experiment with cheaper media, and her technical appreciation of these was later to prove crucial when she had to master the complicated process of lithography required for the Orlando books. She learnt the art of illustration designing book-jackets for W.H. Smith; she made linocuts based on drawings done at Regent's Park zoo; Duncan Grant taught her how to mix colours when she assisted him and Vanessa Bell with an interior decoration project; and she developed her own technique of 'metal pictures', collages on foil and glass similar to those produced contemporaneously by Dora Carrington. When she was able, in the late 1920s and '30s, to work on a larger scale, she painted the rooftops of Fitzroy Street and Bloomsbury in a bold, simplified style that owed much to those artists already associated with these areas.

In 1929, tiring of the social whirl, Morris and Haines left London, to lease The Pound outside Higham in Suffolk - a house which, three years later, was bequeathed to Morris by their landlord. In 1931, Hale and McClean made their own exodus from London, settling at Rabley Willow, a large Victorian house near Elstree in Hertfordshire. At The Pound, Morris, who was soon to gain an international reputation as a plantsman, set about creating the first of his two great gardens; at Rabley Willow, Hale and McClean began to construct their own rural idyll. It was, Hale acknowledged, a perfect environment in which to bring up their two sons, but she found domesticity stifling: her art was not progressing, while her relationship with her husband was growing increasingly strained. On the advice of a psychoanalyst, she initiated an affair with Haines. 'I knew that [it] would be no bed of roses,' she recalled with characteristic candour, 'and I also knew that I wouldn't be the only bush in the rose-bed.' But she believed that it had the effect of re-invigorating her marriage, and of curing her painter's block too.

By the time Hale became Haines's mistress, she had already embarked on the Orlando books, which were to make her famous. Many of her friends make appearances in Many of her friends make appearances in them: they include Haines, who was the prototype for the Katnapper in Orlando's Silver Wedding, and Morris, who turned up as Blanche's dancing master in Orlando's Home Life. The Katnapper's magnetism for cats was based on Haines's own allure for people: 'like the caddis-fly grub acquiring a carapace of sticks and stones, Lett attracted an entourage of all ages and from varied environments,' Hale commented. Morris's inclusion was prompted by his claim that no-one had ever achieved a true likeness of him; Hale's caricature, he was compelled to admit, succeeded where others had previously failed. The setting for Orlando's Silver Wedding was based on The Pound, though the house itself was altered to look like a cat; many individual features in the book were also drawn from the house, and Morris's large colony of cats provided Hale with an inexhaustible supply of models. With Morris, Hale shared a profound love of animals and an intense fascination with the natural world; but as his own visibility as an artist began to diminish, he could not resist an acerbic dig at her rising celebrity. 'Do you mean to tell me, Kathleen,' he asked her once, 'that you have hung your slender reputation on the broad shoulders of a eunuch cat?'