Arresting Beauty: The Artistic Kinship between Julia Margaret Cameron and Virginia Woolf

This essay examines the artistic kinship between Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and her great-niece, modernist writer Virginia Woolf. It considers Julia Princep Jackson (Duckworth Stephen)—Cameron's niece, and Woolf's mother—as a powerful artistic and familial link between the two artists. Both Cameron and Woolf were fascinated with Jackson's beauty and used her as a model in their works. An analysis of Cameron's photographs of Jackson in parallel with Woolf's literary portrayal of her mother in To the Lighthouse (1927) reveals that Woolf's conception of beauty in the novel both resonates with and revises Cameron's aesthetic. Furthermore, Woolf's representation of Mrs. Ramsay's beauty embraces both Victorian and modernist aesthetics, marking her transition from Victorian literary conventions to those of the modernist movement.