Böcker av Kirsty Stonell Walker

Fanny Cornforth was a Victorian supermodel whose face epitomised the vision and life of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In their twenty-five years together, she played many parts from muse, medium and lover to housekeeper and nurse. Due to her care of the artist, he was able to create some of the best known and celebrated art works of the nineteenth century, however at his death Fanny became an outcast, accused of stealing, lying and even murder. Her journey from rural poverty to celebrated beauty gave her a life she could never have dreamed of, but her choice of love above security saw her end her days in an asylum. Her afterlife, in the imagination of those who knew her and those that followed saw her cast as a villainess; RossettiΓÇÖs folly, an illiterate prostitute who could crack walnut shells in her teeth. ItΓÇÖs finally time that the truth is separated from the swirl of lies and that the life of one of the most infamous women of Bohemian London is told, from canvas to asylum.

Julia Margaret Cameron received her first camera at the age of forty-eight, but her love affair with the medium had already spanned several decades and continents. An enthusiast for this newly invented device, she traveled the world befriending experts--such as the astronomer John Herschel; the pioneering photographer (and her brother-in-law) Charles Somers-Cocks, 3rd Earl Somers; and the Swedish risk-taking artist Oscar Rejlander--who taught her the magic and the science of the lens. When fourteen-year-old Mary Hillier delivered a message to Julia's door, little did she know what her life would become. Beginning as Julia's parlor maid, Mary went on to become the photographer's leading model and the focus of the artist's creative passion. For Julia, Mary personified the heavenly qualities of her quiet corner of England. For Mary, Julia's influence would echo throughout her life. This is a biography of two women who experienced beauty, love, loss, and fame, and out of them created photographs that, in Julia's own words "should electrify you with delight and startle the world." Spanning the French Revolution until the 1930s, and fully illustrated throughout, Light and Love tells the story of a rare partnership of a pioneer and her muse, and how their relationship would change the course of both of their lives.