Heather Cooper’s excellent historical novel invites the reader into maverick, pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron’s Isle of Wight home, and into the lives of illustrious artists like the neighbouring Tennyson, through the eyes of Mary Ryan – a beggar girl scooped up by Cameron from the streets of Putney. Mary progresses from parlourmaid to photographer’s model to gallery assistant, but even if she can walk the downs and talk poetry with the Poet Laureate, she can’t shake off her humble origins. Or can she?

Cooper’s intelligent prose matches her bright, plucky, unpretentious heroine, Mary Ryan, who finds herself serving in the household of Julia Margaret Cameron. Here she meets the great and the good – Tennyson, Browning et al – and becomes a model for her mistress’s stylised, allegorical photography.

‘I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied.’

Julia Margaret Cameron

Cooper, like her character, respects society’s luminaries rather than idolizing them, preferring to focus on Mary’s private ambitions for self-improvement and security in a world where women, especially those ‘in service’, are unlikely to achieve either. This is a ‘below stairs’ book, not a celebration of the literati. The narrative is beguilingly simple, making Mary’s rapid social progression pleasingly credible, and always engaging. The reader yearns for Mary’s success, and with some nods to Austen along the way, Cooper delivers.

For anyone who knows and loves the Isle of Wight, there had to be a right way to tell the story of life in Julia Margaret Cameron’s Dimbola Lodge, and Tennyson’s Farringford, and Cooper has found it. ARRESTING BEAUTY is a gem.

Published 30 September 2023, Beachy Books.
www.beachybooks.com