Books by Clare Leighton (illustrator)
“The Return of the Native is a great, super melodramatic Thomas Hardy novel. His earlier novels were criticized for being either too boring or too sensational, and he tried to strike a happy medium with this one. He wrote a five-act tragedy about a tiny village in England and submitted it to various publishers, most of whom rejected it…He ends up placing the novel at Belgravia, which is a middle-brow magazine. They won’t publish a tragedy, so they make him add a sixth act that ends happily. A little bonus is that in any contemporary edition you’ll find, at the end of the fifth act, Hardy notes that there are two possible endings for the book, and that ‘those with an austere artistic code can assume the more consistent conclusion to be the true one.’ This might be paraphrased as ‘this book should be sad.’ It’s a classic Hardy novel, full of landscape and striving people and romance, and it’s really beautiful.” Read more...
Rosalind Parry, Literary Scholar
Interviews where books by Clare Leighton (illustrator) were recommended
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1
Return of the Native (Illustrated)
by Clare Leighton (illustrator) & Thomas Hardy -
2
Moby Dick (Illustrated)
by Herman Melville & Rockwell Kent (illustrator) -
3
Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (Illustrated)
by Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë & Fritz Eichenberg (illustrator) -
4
Persuasion (Illustrated)
by Jane Austen & Joan Hassall (illustrator)
The Best Illustrated Novels, recommended by Rosalind Parry
The Best Illustrated Novels, recommended by Rosalind Parry
The craze of the 1930s and 1940s was for beautifully illustrated editions of the great Victorian novels, affordably priced to take pride of place in a middle-class home. Lecturer and author Rosalind Parry recommends five outstanding editions whose illustrations are as striking as their stories.
