Getting it Right

I have spoken before about Brookner's covers, the many disappointments and misfires. Recently, when the cover for the forthcoming Penguin Essentials edition of A Start in Life was unveiled, there was consternation in some quarters. A Penguin Essentials publication has a certain cachet. Next stop Penguin Classics, one might have thought.

An opportunity missed

Studying Corot's Between Lake Geneva and the Alps for a recent post made me think of the cover of the UK hardback edition of A Closed Eye, which always seemed to me to get it right. It showed part of John Inchbold's View above Montreux, 1880, in the V&A. Not an outlandish choice, perhaps, but well judged. The image captures, I think, in its deadness, its pallor, some of the horrified sense of defeat Harriet feels in her Swiss exile.