Sneak preview: March 2017 Furrowed Middlebrow covers & intros

I'm excited to be able to share with you now the official covers for the eleven new Furrowed Middlebrow titles being released by Dean Street Press in early March (if you missed the announcement just before Christmas, see here). I might be biased, but I think they've turned out brilliantly and I can't wait to see the finished products.

And before you scroll down and spoil the surprise, I'm delighted to be able to note that one of the covers is a particular standout thanks to the generous permission of one of the U.K.'s foremost and most beloved illustrators, none other than Shirley Hughes herself, who has allowed us to use her absolutely marvelous original jacket art from Elizabeth Fair's The Native Heath. Several of the original Fair jackets were enticing, but none so much so as this one, and I'm really thrilled that we were able to re-use it. We also got a warm feeling from the fact that Hughes and her daughter gave us positive feedback on our cover designs in general. 

In addition to fetishizing the covers, though, I wanted to mention the newly-commissioned introductions these books will include.

Some of you are already familiar with Elizabeth Crawford thanks to the wonderful intros she provided for our Winifred Peck and Rachel Ferguson titles last time around. I'm delighted to say she will also be providing an introduction to the six Elizabeth Fair reprints we'll be releasing in March. What's more, I understand Elizabeth has now made contact with a relative of this elusive author, so I'm very eager to see what information she is unearthing even as I write this!

For the Monica Tindall novel, we have an introduction by no lesser literary figure than Gillian Tindall, the author's niece and a spectacularly acclaimed author herself, while for Ursula Orange we have an intro from businesswoman and television producer and director Stacy Marking. I've had a glimpse of these two intros already, and quite apart from my excitement at the reprinting of the novels themselves, I'm very happy to have some fascinating new information about the authors' lives and careers.

And finally, for our edition of E. Nesbit's The Lark, we have a new introduction by author and historian Charlotte Moore, herself a Nesbit fan. Moore, many of you will already know, is the author of the acclaimed memoir George and Sam, about her family life with two autistic sons, as well as Hancox: A House and a Family, about her Tudor family home in Sussex.

As I mentioned before, the books will be released in early March. They should start becoming available for pre-order on Amazon and other sites in the next few weeks.

But now, without further ado, the covers!