Quick quiz for fans of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series of young adult vampire novels: What is Bella's favourite book?
If you said Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, then give yourself a point. I, too, will give myself a point for knowing this, although I confess I cheated: I haven't read Twilight or any of its sequels, nor have I seen the film, and I don't have the faintest clue who Bella is. I do know what her favourite read is, though, because a cover for a new edition of Wuthering Heights tells me so.
Novels getting a makeover because of a TV or movie adaptation is nothing new, though this is perhaps the first time I've ever seen a classic of English literature get re-branded because it is the favourite book of a character in another work of fiction.
And it isn't just the metaphysical endorsement from Twilight's Bella … the new edition of Wuthering Heights, from Harper, borrows the contemporary Gothic design style of Meyer's successful series. The American edition, coming in October, re-presents the Brontë novel with a cover comprising a black background and blood-red rose, while the UK edition opts for a tender white bloom, and the very vampiric cover blurb: Love Never Dies.
Should we be appalled, or approving of this latest move? Those of us who find ourselves shaking our heads and muttering, "Dreadful, dreadful", are possibly marvelling at the chutzpah of those who would make an enduring classic such as Wuthering Heights (they're still making telly out of it, 160-odd years on) into a pale imitation of a mass-market publishing phenomenon aimed at adolescent girls.
Those of us who don't find it too offensive may be ruminating on all the extra sales that Wuthering Heights might pick up thanks to Meyer's championing of it, and on the young readers who might otherwise not have been exposed to the Brontë novel – at least one blogger is reading her way through all the classic novels namechecked in the Twilight books, and reporting back on her blog, Bella's Bookshelf.
Controversy over the marketing of books is nothing new, of course. Last year Margaret Drabble complained, "I have had a weird feeling that I'm being dumbed down by my publishers and it's interesting there's an agenda of how it should be in the marketplace." Around the same time, Fay Weldon – author of such books as The Life and Loves of a She Devil, featuring a distinctly un-slender protagonist – expressed her displeasure that her back catalogue was being reissued with misleading chick-lit style covers featuring "little drawings of rather absurd people on pink and blue covers".
There might be an argument that it is the writer's job purely to write, and that it is the marketing department of a publishing house which is responsible for ensuring that the end result sells to the widest possible audience. That doesn't mean the choices for book covers is always right, though, as Australian author Justine Larbalestier found when she successfully tackled her American publishers over the US cover of her novel Liar. The children's book has "a short-haired black girl called Micah" as its central character; Bloomsbury's first go at a cover featured a long-haired white girl. Bloomsbury backed down.
Quite what Emily Brontë would make of it all is anyone's guess, although she would probably be quite gratified to actually have her name on the latest editions of Wuthering Heights – like her sisters, in her early career she adopted a male-sounding name, Ellis Bell, to overcome the prejudice against women writers. There's a fair chance, though, that she might be spinning in her grave at the thought that her work is best marketed with the intimation that it is a pale imitation of Stephenie Meyer. And that's not a course of action which is to be encouraged, given the latest publishing fad for mashing up classic texts, re-inventing them as gory horror stories, and flogging them to the Twilight generation.
