With the popularity of eBooks and Kindles, do you fear book covers are becoming extinct? Tim Kreider laments in “The Decline and Fall of the Book Cover” (published in The New Yorker, July 16, 2013), “soon enough, book covers, like album covers before them—like albums themselves, or sheet music for popular songs, or dance cards—will be a quaint, old-timey thing you have to explain to the uninterested young” (p. 4). However, Kreider qualifies in this same article, “For some reason children’s books, Y.A. literature, and genre fiction still have license to beguile their readers with gorgeous cover illustrations, but mature readers aren’t supposed to require such enticements” (p. 3). This assignment invites you to design one such “beguiling” book cover for one of the three Brontë works we are reading this semester—Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, or The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. In designing your cover, also consider novelist John Updike’s advice in “Deceptively Conceptual: Books and Their Covers” (New Yorker, October 10, 2005): “A good cover should be a bit recessive in its art, leading us past the cover into the book itself” (p. 2). The following covers created by students in EN 248 on "The Brontës" lead us “into the book itself” by highlighting symbols, themes, and characters essential to Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
"When the Past Refuses to Die: Exploring the Tumultuous Themes of Wuthering Heights through Book Cover Design," Wuthering Heights Book Cover Created by Millie Everitt, 2026. With the rise of sleek, minimalist paperbacks, many modern covers of Wuthering Heights (1847) have softened the novel into a windswept romance set on the Yorkshire Moors. Yet Emily Brontë’s moors are not merely romantic; they are haunted landscapes where love becomes destructive, and the past refuses to stay in the past. My book cover resists the temptation to sentimentalize the novel’s central relationship of Catherine and Heathcliff to foreground an atmosphere of restless haunting. My design emphasizes that Wuthering Heights is governed not by tender love but the inescapable presence of the dead. By visually merging landscape with memory, the moors themselves warp and smear, allowing the cover to lead readers “into the book itself” as Kriedler notes in a New Yorker article on book covers (2013). Brontë entwines setting and psychology so completely that the natural world becomes a canvas for Catherine and Heathcliff’s obsession, love, and haunting revenge.
Wuthering Heights Book Cover Created by Kit Simpson, 2026.
"The Importance of Place in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights," Book Cover Created by Paige Goodsell, 2026. When picking out books in the library or bookstore with no knowledge of its contents, one cannot help but judge a book by its cover. Even though “the important thing is to be different,” as William Krider notes in a New Yorker article on book covers, contemporary book covers are becoming bland, using the same fonts and designs. While many covers paint Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) as purely a romance novel between Catherine and Heathcliff, I wanted to avoid conformity by privileging the Yorkshire moors where Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights are placed. As Tim Cresswell notes in Place: A Short Introduction, “When humans invest meaning in a portion of space and then become attached to it in some way (naming is one such way), it becomes a place” (10). Using place theory to explore the characterization of Wuthering Heights, my book cover uses the moors as a place that shapes the main characters and exhibits their unspoken desires and emotions. Catherine’s love triangle with Heathcliff and Edgar is rooted in place, and her two love interests are tied deeply with the two different houses in the novel–Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. However, in the end, as my book cover reveals, all three characters end up buried side by side in their true home of the moors.
"One and the Same: The Dangers of Obsessive Love in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights," Book Cover Created by Clover Donoghue, 2026. To design a book cover is like getting to choose one’s own face, down to the maddening
struggle of trying to understand what face would “best express your inner self” (Kreider 1) to the world. Trying to find only visage is an impossible feat especially if one is intertwined with another as the case with Catherine and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Catherine and Heathcliff are never truly whole without the other. While the novel pushes its way
through the tumultuous events of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, what ghosts its way throughout the narrative is Catherine Earnshaw, the loss of her love and life leading to the loss of Heathcliff’s self as a result, and vice versa. Through fractured reflections in a broken mirror and the use of opposing colors, my book cover focuses on the idea that Catherine and
Heathcliff are one and the same no matter their positions in life, as well as how Catherine’s death influences the violence and misery inflicted throughout the second part of the novel.
"Let the Dogs Alone!," Book Cover Created by Cora Burch, 2026. Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights is packed with dogs. Shaggy or shorthaired, docile or aggressive, over “half-a-dozen four-footed-fiends” populate the moors in nearly every chapter (Brontë, 6). In designing my book cover for this novel, I developed a particular interest in how Brontë uses dogs to symbolize the unrealized violent intentions of her human characters. The members of the Earnshaw and Linton families use dogs as stand-ins for themselves as they navigate their violent feud, representing in turn Heathcliff’s antipathy for his tenant, an argument between the Linton siblings, and Heathcliff’s conquest of Isabella.
"The Moors: How Landscape Impacts The Characters of Wuthering Heights," Book Cover Created by Katie Cromie, 2026. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the moors play an integral role to both the plot of the and the development of the residents of the Heights. The moors serve as a place of refuge, but they also act as a barrier from the rest of the world. Their presence isolates the central house, Wuthering Heights, from the rest of civilization, which allows Catherine and Heathcliff to live free from prying eyes and society’s judgment but forces Lockwood to ultimately flee. Through elements such as a tree, rolling hills, and a dark sky, my book cover seeks to demonstrate how central nature is and emphasize the isolation that the moors create in Wuthering Heights.
"Estates and The Language of the Flowers in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall," Book Cover Created by Catherine J. Golden, 2026. Anne Brontë names The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) after one of the grand homes where her protagonist, Helen Graham (nee Lawrence) lives. But the novel contains three grand homes—Staningley, where the novel begins and ends; Grassdale Manor, where Helen lives with her handsome but dissolute husband, Arthur Huntingdon; and Wildfell Hall, the abandoned mansion that Helen, posing as a widow, escapes to with her young son, Arthur, to hide from her abusive husband where she meets Gilbert Markham, a young farmer who falls in love with her. This book cover includes both a grand home and a close-up of two hands—symbolizing Arthur and Helen—and a Christmas rose, which Helen gives to Gilbert when they meet in Staningley. This book cover focuses on Anne Brontë’s use of the Victorian language of the flowers to reunite the lovers: a Christmas rose means “tranquilize my anxiety.” The grand home in the background symbolizes not only Staningley but also Grassdale Manor and Wildfell Hall, signaling the journey Helen will make among these settings to find love at last with Gilbert.