Hello, I'm David Kern. I'm Heidi White. I'm Karen Swallow Pryor. And you are listening to Close

Reeds, a podcast for the Incurable Reader. And we are here to discuss Charlotte Bronte's.

Jane A, we're here to discuss chapters 21 through 24. They're kind of a big deal, these chapters.

A lot happens. A tree gets split and Karen's going to

explain a bunch of other stuff that happens in this chapter. Tree gets split by lightning,

which is like kind of a crucial image based on the cover of Karen's edition of this book.

And Karen, I want to ask you, since that happens right in the middle of this section, I guess

it's at the end of 23. And in a second, we're going to do a recap. But I want to talk about that image

and was wondering why you chose that particular image to be on the cover of this edition. And then we'll

get into the regular discussion. So, no, actually, I was excited to talk about this because the

Close Reads Facebook group had a big part to play in this.

So it's you guys.

So the way the whole process with the covers works, well, I'll probably say more than people

want to hear, but we picked out a color scheme first.

That was the first thing for all the covers although we just

made a final decision about the last one that would that you guys help with that too but so two at a

time as i'm doing the books um the the artist at my publisher comes with a few different designs for

each title uh with a few or sometimes we discuss the idea. And with Janeair,

I'm sure there were some other images, but we decided on a tree. But the first tree, as someone in the

group said, looked very bronchial. It just looked like a set of lungs. And so we tweaked it a little bit.

And so what we tried to capture here was, you know, that it is sort of hit by lightning.

It's not split in two, but there is a dead there.

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