"Celebrated pioneer photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron was also at the center of an elite circle of English artists and writers who shaped a generation of Victorian culture. Working in the 1860s, when photography was still young, Cameron defied the conventions of the scientific photographic establishment to insist that photography could be an art form." "Born of English and French parents in Calcutta in 1815, Cameron was a scion of the colonial ruling class. She lived the typical life of a memsahib - marrying a high-ranking Member of the Council of India and raising six children - until her husband's retirement in 1848. But this conventional exterior belied a fiercely intellectual and creative woman who had befriended influential figures such as the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray and the scientist Sir John Herschel; it was through Herschel that Cameron first learned of the invention of photography in 1839." "It was not until 1863, when she was forty-eight years old, that Cameron was given a camera and took up photography with all her energy and newly discovered talent. From the first her work included both the celebrated portraits of Victorian men of genius and allegorical and religious photographs of members of her own household. Cameron wrote that she "longed to arrest all beauty" and the result was a series of extraordinary studies that were compared at the time to works by Titian, Rembrandt, and Raphael. These pictures, many of which are reproduced in this book, illuminate some of the deepest convictions and contradictions of Victorian life." "Drawing on unpublished letters and new scholarship, this is a meticulously researched biography that locates Cameron within the intellectual and cultural milieu of Victorian England."--Jacket.