When Clare Leighton (1898–1989) engraved illustrations for her 1929 edition of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1872), she said: “I was Egdon Heath, feeling the hooves of the cropper ponies and the turn of the undergrowth.” She was this land, that road, those flowers. She was precisely in the place of Hardy’s book, embracing the layering of the fictional and real that her act of creation entailed. The passage of time and the trauma of World War I might have suggested a need for nostalgia, but Leighton’s images of a prewar, preindustrial landscape were very much rooted in the present. She took Hardy’s England as a telescope into a rural, land-based life that she further explored in her accounts of creating a working garden and farm, Four Hedges (1935) and Country Matters (1937). Of particular interest is the way that she treated her full-sized illustrations, which were narrative and text-based, and her head- and tailpieces, which were more observational. The alchemy of these two kinds of images mimicked Hardy’s plotting, which also oscillated between character and landscape.

Before his commission to illustrate Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Fritz Eichenberg (1901–90) had neither read the novel nor been to Britain. To illustrate it from New York and in the middle of World War II, he imaginatively occupied Jane’s lucid gaze. Brontë’s first-person account seems so profoundly personal that many Victorian readers thought that, as its subtitle “An Autobiography” suggested, it must be a memoir. Woolf said that to write down one’s impressions of the novel year after year would be tantamount to recording the story of one’s life. The same could be said of illustrating it. Eichenberg had fled Berlin for New York with his Jewish family in 1933, motivated by fear of retribution for his anti-Hitler cartoons. As he immersed himself in visualizing Jane’s voice, and shaping his figures, background, and compositions around her perspective, he overlaid his experience of flight, emigration, and movement onto Jane’s. His gouging, roughly hewn engravings are a self-portrait, narrativized not by his life events but by Jane’s. His Jane Eyre is also telling of a culture of collection and ownership; the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed his edition to subscribers.

The coda traces the ways that the reprints featured in this book have continued to reverberate in the culture at large. It asks what to make of the reprinted book and the home library in our current age which is, on the one hand, increasingly online, and, on the other, increasingly preoccupied with the aesthetics of books and bookshelves.

This introductory chapter contends that reprints are special sites of interpretation, illumination, and reinvention, and introduces the artists and works that this book will be about. It also uses debates about readership – among authors like F. R. Leavis and Virginia Woolf – and changes in publishing practices—in book clubs, larger print runs, and wood-engraved illustrations – to set the stage for the ways in which the legacy of the nineteenth-century novel was crafted for and by twentieth-century readers.