The Poor Clare cover for Cita Press

Cita Press is a not-for-profit imprint and an open-access library focusing on historic and contemporary literary works by women authors. I designed the cover for the 2021 Cita Press re-issue of The Poor Clare, Elizabeth Gaskell’s classic Victorian gothic novella about paranormal connections between two generations of Irish women. Although set in a 19th century Catholic convent and narrated from a male perspective, The Poor Clare is still an oddly compelling feminist read.

Like other Cita publications, cover for The Poor Clare is made using exclusively open-access resources and follows a rigid design template with a pre-determined color palette, layout, and typography, making the illustration a focal point of the cover.

Visual exploration for the project began with historic portraits of Irish women and Catholic saints. But to create a modern, eerie, and suspenseful image that spoke to the story, the selected illustration was developed by superimposing two public-domain photographic prints, further intensified by added textural elements. The photographs, sourced from the Library of Congress, depict an unidentified young woman looking straight at us in one shot, and turning away in another.