The Friday Face Off meme was created by Books by Proxy and hosted by Lynn. For each week’s theme, we select a matching book and compare its different book covers across editions. Perfect for a visual fix!
(I’m obviously late to this meme, but so eager to grapple with book cover art!)
Theme for Friday Face Off #1 is:
Dressed in White – could be a person could be a landscape – or something else completely?
In Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, there is literally a character dressed in white, a mysterious figure at the heart of this classic Gothic mystery from 1859. A gallery of a few of its book covers below:
My own personal favorite from these is the Vintage Collins edition in the middle row, to the left. I think that cover captures the theme of the mysterious lady seen at night, dressed in all white, very well indeed. This has been a fun Friday Face Off!
It’s time for #6degrees. Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up. Inspired by the Six Degrees of Separation Meme hosted every month at Books are my Favorite and Best.
A very young woman’s first job: governess for two weirdly beautiful, strangely distant, oddly silent children, Miles and Flora, at a forlorn estate…An estate haunted by a beckoning evil. Half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows- silent, foul phantoms who, day by day, night by night, come closer, ever closer. With growing horror, the helpless governess realizes the fiendish creatures want the children, seeking to corrupt their bodies, possess their minds, own their souls… But worse-much worse- the governess discovers that Miles and Flora have no terror of the lurking evil. For they want the walking dead as badly as the dead want them.
What better book than Turn of the Screw for this Halloween month? Incidentally, since I am also participating in the 2020 Readers Imbibing Peril (R.I.P.) XV challenge this month, here are six spooky reads, all following up from Turn of the Screw.
The first time I heard of The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe was in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. (I think that’s the case for most people.) In Northanger, Catherine Morland’s fondness for Gothic novels and active imagination results in a disastrous misinterpretation, and Mysteries of Udolpho is one of those novels. Clearly, not very high praise when it comes to practical real life.
There is much villainy afoot …
… This led to the question, whether the spirit, after it has quitted the body, is ever permitted to revisit the earth; and if it is, whether it was possible for spirits to become visible to the sense …
In Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily St. Aubere’s father similarly admonishes her to not give in to impractical sentimentality. But then he dies and leaves her orphaned in the hands of his rather shallow sister, Madame Cheron. Madame Cheron and Emily do not get along, to put it mildly.
That situation worsens when Madame Cheron ends up marrying Signor Montoni, a stylish Italian whom everyone seems to admire but no one seems to like. Montoni is the quintessential Gothic villain who, gambles, drinks, cheats, broods and schemes. (I expect he had a mustache too, which he twirled a lot as he brooded.)
Poor Emily has a terrible time of it all. She learns her father was hiding a terrible secret from his salad days. Her engagement with young Valancourt is broken off and her hand promised to another without her consent. Her home and father’s impoverished estates in France are rented away, and Montoni packs them off (eventually) to the desolate castle of Udolpho.
Nestled in the Apennine mountains of Italy, Udolpho’s grandeur has faded with time and neglect. It once belonged to Montoni’s relative, Signora Laurentini, who died in mysterious circumstances. There are rumors that Montoni killed her off out of jealousy and to grab her estates. Certainly, nothing can be put past Montoni, who it turns out is now leading a band of mercenaries, the Condottieri.
