Carmilla by Pushkin Press, Cover Design by Jo Walker
Jo Walker’s cover design for Carmilla is a beautiful paradox on its own. It wishes to highlight the figure of Carmilla as the central vampire protagonist of the tale while choosing to hide her in multiple layers of abstract shapes, and a mix of white, red, and black colours. This paradox highlights the way in which Carmilla chooses to hide in plain sight in front of Laura in Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella. The cover designed by Jo Walker captures Laura’s inability to recognise that Carmilla is in fact the Countess Mircalla Karnstein even when she recognises similarities between her and the portrait she finds of the Countess. The implication that Carmilla is, in fact, the Countess Mircalla is also depicted through the back cover of this edition. While the back cover can be seen as a depiction of a castle with the path leading to it in the foreground, the wavy lines of the path can also be seen as the hair of Carmilla with the castle almost visualised as a crown or a coronet on her head. The wavy lines on the back cover mirror the curly lines that define the hair of Carmilla on the front cover. It combines the personal, intimate expression of Carmilla’s passion on the front of the cover with her expression of power and authority as a Countess on the back.
There is also a deliberate ambiguity in the way the image of Carmilla is presented which once again mirrors the ambivalent nature of her personality. Carmilla’s nature seems to combine her vampiric desires with a passionate feeling of love towards Laura, something which the use of bright red colour on the cover effectively conveys. The way Walker chooses to end the cover illustration just above Carmilla’s lips is also important as it draws the focus towards her tiny protruding teeth, thus making her vampiric identity the central theme of the cover design. For all of Carmilla’s display of passion and love towards Laura, the desire to feed on her blood dominates her animalistic impulse, an idea developed adequately through the cover itself.
Walker’s cover design, with the predominance of red colour for the front and the grey colour for the back captures the duality of a sanguineous life that Carmilla enjoys through her vampirism and a deathlike pallor that forms the true nature of her undead self. The volume of her hair and the fullness of her face depicted on the cover contribute to the essence of this borrowed life. The abstract nature of Walker’s art thus builds upon the dark shadows through which Carmilla escapes, and the splendour and luxuriant intensity of her life as an undead Countess manifested through the application of the reflective red colour.