ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPH OF CLARE LEIGHTON, Ulmann, Doris (American, 1882-1934), https://edpollackfinearts.com/original-photograph-clare-leighton

Clare Leighton built a legacy as both an artist and a writer, and the two roles were deeply connected in her work. She created about 650 engravings for 45 books, including Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights in 1931, but she wrote many of those books herself which she often treated image-making and authorship as parts of the same act of expression (Rice 1). In her own books, she made that authorship visible by marking them as “Written and Engraved by Clare Leighton,” a claim that insisted her voice belonged to the text as much as to the image (1).


Her writing shows how highly she valued the countryside as a cultural memory worth preserving. In Country Matters, she wrote that “the countryside was the last hope for sanity,” and she used that work to record changing rural customs, tools, and social life (Rice 137). That makes her legacy larger than illustrations alone—she was also a writer trying to capture a world she thought was disappearing.

"Witches it seem, do not feel the cold. Her familiar, a small black cat called Robin, dozes at her feet, or washes himself, leg lifted upwards in a sinuous curve, when a storm threatens." Country Matters, p.25, "The Village Witch"

Leighton also drew folklore and folk belief into her art and writing. Kathleen Rice explains that in “The Village Witch,” her text and engravings emphasize “the waning strength of witches and the diluted belief in superstition in this century,” showing her interest in how older traditions survive inside modern life (Rice 140). Her image of “The Village Witch” from Country Matters reinforces the belief that this folklore was not a minor detail for her, but a major part of the cultural landscape she was preserving (140).

What causes Leighton’s work to last is that combination of witnessing and claiming. She wrote and engraved to keep alive “the greater understanding of eternal values,” and her career shows a woman insisting that her own interpretation mattered, even when the culture around her did not always grant it full attention (140).