Jenny Uglow mixes words with pictures

By Tom Edwards

Illustration and language have not always been happy bedfellows, but last year Jenny Uglow shone light on their happier moments together with Words & Pictures, a history of both artists’ interpretations of written works and their authors’ not always favourable reactions.

It was a small experiment,” Jenny says. “I’d written before about authors with a strong visual sense and illustrators who told stories with their pictures, and writing about the two together a natural progression.”

“Illustrators and writers have collided in very different ways, from straightforward line drawings to Blake’s deeply personal watercolours. Researching all these drawings was a fantastic treat.”

Her talk will focus on this research, complimenting Words & Pictures by offering a ‘making of’ insight into the book. Jenny will be sharing some of the questions that came to her while writing.

Words & Pictures has received a great deal of praise, but not every critic has been besotted by it. Writing in the Sunday Times, John Casey complained of “Uglow’s uncritical acclaim for book illustrators as a species”, arguing that by replacing the reader’s imagination illustrations do far more to harm works of literature than they do aid them.


But this did little to deflate Jenny. “I loved John Carey’s review,” she says; “it’s just the kind of argument you want to get going.” “Certainly I agree that some works are impossible to illustrate, and others very irritating, but I do also think that there are different ways of looking at illustration.”

Writers And Artists: Intriguing Connections can be heard at 5pm Thursday in Main House.