The Random House Book of Shakespeare Stories

William Shakespeare’s World in Angela Barrett’s Illustrations

Angela Barrett is among the most renowned British book illustrators of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Her works for The Wild Swans and Beauty and the Beast gained wide recognition and attracted great interest from collectors.

Barrett’s style is characterised by a distinctive form of realism, combined with deliberate distortions of proportion, a free approach to perspective, and unconventional artistic choices. In the 1990s and early 2000s, this approach marked a significant breakthrough in book illustration and exerted considerable influence on her contemporaries. Many artists attempted to reproduce her techniques, but their works often lacked the sense of mystification and the unconventional narrative vision that define Barrett’s illustrations.

The artist frequently treats literary texts as a space for her own parallel storytelling: she alters settings, juxtaposes different historical eras, and enriches her compositions with details that add subtle layers of meaning. For instance, in one illustration the puppet maker’s daughter is shown with a hairstyle meant to convey painful tension from a tightly drawn bun, while Snow White, at the moment of fainting, is depicted in a pose echoing Lee Miller’s famous photograph of a Nazi officer’s daughter.

In her interview with The Guardian, Barrett remarked on her cautious attitude toward perfect endings: “Yes… I always feel that my happy endings are somehow inadequate. I’m wary of perfect conclusions. I’m always disappointed by the way Jane Austen ties things up so easily at the end… The truth is, I’m more easily moved by distress. I’m no good at jolly scenes of dancing and merriment — laughter can be so sinister.”