May Prinsep as Christabel. Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1866.
- Cameron, Julia Margaret, 1815-1879.
- Date:
- 1866
- Reference:
- 14081i
- Pictures
- Online
Selected images from this work
View 1 imageAbout this work
Description
"'Yea, she doth smile, and she doth weep, / Like a youthful hermitess, / Beauteous in a wilderness.'--Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge's unfinished poem "Christabel" (1816) tells the story of a young woman debased by sorcery. A dark poem, full of rolling fog and lesbian innuendo, "Christabel" was the kind of tale that appealed to the Victorian palate--a soup of sexual transgression and moral repair. Cameron rarely made portraits of women; rather, when she photographed them, they appeared as representations of some biblical, mythological, or literary figure. Cameron's niece, May Prinsep, who would later marry Hallam Tennyson, son of the poet laureate, appears here as the ethereal Christabel before her corruption." – online catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Publication/Creation
Physical description
Contributors
References note
Reference
Type/Technique
Subjects
Where to find it
Location Status Access Closed stores