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Traditional Uses
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Narrative – The Book
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Audrey Niffenegger
“I’ve got to abandon this notion of depicting these characters. How does this thing feel, really?”
main character of Anne Elliot was by her family and society’s conventions. One of the consistent elements of the series was hand-rendered type, and her original concept became the binding title lettering. “That was the first idea I had when I re-read the text, that Anne was being bound by persuasion itself, that the very words all her people were saying to her were strangling her.” This was further developed by the shape of the word being formed of a briar stem. “It does look much more unpleasant with thorns, doesn’t it?” The cover texts, including credits and back-cover blurb, were all applied directly onto the artwork in one layer, by hand with a crow quill pen. Both books’ covers are wraparounds, allowing for continued extensions of the front cover concept. For Persuasion, the cover briars blossom into roses on the interior flaps. “I was thinking about the reputation of Jane Austen’s work as ‘romance’. When you read her actual work, she’s not at all starry-eyed or frilly; she’s very hard-edged about the realities of marriage and money and what it takes to make society function. So the roses are meant to reference romance, but they are mostly stem and thorns with a few blooms and a dark background.” The Sense and Sensibility artwork includes curling pen lines, as Audrey wanted to remind readers of the way Austen would have written these books, “by hand, with a dip pen. In my original art the hands were greenish, corpselike, but Penguin asked for more lively hands as they thought the green might be off-putting to gentle
readers.” The portrait of Austen on the inside back flaps is based on an engraving of the author. The Sense and Sensibility cover went through several ideas, looking for an image that would convey the book’s “balance between reason and turbulence”, as Audrey describes it. These representations of the novel’s contrasting Dashwood sisters proved to be either too extreme for the publisher – including the two women with cut-out medical engravings of a brain and heart for their heads: “Jane Austen meets Max Ernst” – or too sweet. Finally, Audrey realised she needed to take another approach. “I’ve got to abandon this notion of depicting these characters. How does this thing feel, really? And I decided that what it feels like is this very big, emotional tempest happening in this tiny constrained, domestic scene. So I ended up, literally, with a tempest in a teacup.” The cup and saucer chosen to be depicted in the artwork have a personal connection to the artist, having belonged to her great grandmother. Some elements were adjusted on the final versions of both published covers (the original artwork colours are shown here), with the background colours enhanced to brighten the yellow and pink colours. Audrey felt the commissions had been a good collaborative experience and, as part of a series of covers taking an irreverent approach to their titles’ contents, her artwork encourages a fresh interpretation of two classic novels. Audrey Niffenegger lives in the USA.
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, original artwork before colour adjustments for print. Art Director Paul Buckley, Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions series, 2011
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Understanding Illustration
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