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Older Seton Covers

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Michy
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Post by Michy » Sat May 22nd, 2010, 3:52 pm

[quote=""annis""]Geoff Taylor did a series of rather cool covers for Anya Seton novels at one stage - they are pictured here at his website:
http://www.geofftaylor-artist.com/galle ... TON%20Anya

Misfit- i should have given you the date of my Avalon edition -- it was a 1978 reprint of the original 1966 Coronet edition.[/quote]
Wow, those are really gorgeous. Wish I had them. It doesn't appear that he did a cover for Katherine, though. Wonder why?

I browsed through the thread of the Katherine covers, and the definite majority of them show Katherine with red or reddish hair. Wonder why? Are there any documents that indicate that was her coloring? Or is red just the "default" hair color for the ultimate femme fatale? ;)

I do like the covers that Chicago Review Press used on their re-releases. Thankfully, they only did a couple of headless women. I don't know how that trend started, but I am so tired of it already.

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Margaret
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Post by Margaret » Sat May 22nd, 2010, 5:26 pm

I browsed through the thread of the Katherine covers, and the definite majority of them show Katherine with red or reddish hair. Wonder why? Are there any documents that indicate that was her coloring? Or is red just the "default" hair color for the ultimate femme fatale?
A smidgen of both, I suspect. Not from documents, but from portraits. One of Katherine's children by John of Gaunt was an ancestor of the Tudor line of rulers, and both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I both had reddish hair, so the artist may have felt that was a sufficient shred of evidence to base Katherine's coloring on. But who knows which branch of the family the red hair came from; it may have been the Tudor branch.
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annis
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Post by annis » Sat May 22nd, 2010, 6:51 pm

Seton describes Katherine as having red hair, so I guess the illustrators are going with that, Where Seton picked up that description from is another matter. Medieval chroniclers have an annoying habit of not bothering to add details like hair and eye colour!

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Michy
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Post by Michy » Sat May 22nd, 2010, 6:57 pm

I just read Katherine a couple of months ago, so I should have remembered that detail, but I've already forgotten!!

annis
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Post by annis » Sat May 22nd, 2010, 8:32 pm

Just had a quick look at Seton's references, Michy, and it seems fairly clear that she just went with her imagination in describing Katherine as having grey eyes and dark red hair. Apparently Katherine's beauty was attested though, in a contemporary tribute which called her "eximia pulchritudine feminam": an extraordinarily beautiful woman.

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Margaret
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Post by Margaret » Sun May 23rd, 2010, 7:57 pm

There's an illustration from an old frontispiece of Chaucer's Troilus and Cressyde that some think may represent Katherine Swynford. See http://katherineswynford.tk/page2/page3/page3.html. No hair showing, though.
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Misfit
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Post by Misfit » Mon February 25th, 2013, 7:50 pm

Found a couple of vintage editions at the UBS and of course I had to pick them up and scan them.
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Ariadne
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Post by Ariadne » Mon February 25th, 2013, 7:55 pm

That's the edition of Winthrop Woman that I first read and still own. It's really not bad compared to some of the others.

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Misfit
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Post by Misfit » Mon February 25th, 2013, 8:21 pm

It looks a lot better IRL, it scanned a bit dark. I was just looking at the covers on the Goodreads page. I love looking at those vintage covers.
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Ariadne
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Post by Ariadne » Mon February 25th, 2013, 8:40 pm

Sounds about right. I remember it was dark brown rather than black.

This is the cover of my copy of The Turquoise, which I rather like.

OTOH, this one is whoa, scary.

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