Julia Margaret Cameron & Jane Austen at the Morgan
Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron
May 30-September
14, 2025
A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250
June 6-September 14, 2025
Reviewed by Ed Voves
Whether by chance or design, the Morgan Library and Museum is currently presenting parallel exhibitions detailing the lives of two of Great Britain's most accomplished women. Spanning the era of Britain's greatest global influence, the Morgan exhibitions show how these extraordinary individuals played key roles in shaping the development of literature and photography.
Both Jane Austen and Julia Margaret Cameron made mighty contributions in exploring and depicting human emotion in naturalistic terms. Though their chosen forms of expression, word and image, were very different, there is an amazing continuum of creative energy and vision in the lives of Austen and Cameron.
Ed Voves, Photo (2025)
Gallery views of A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250 and Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron, showing a replica of Jane Austen’s writing table & Julia Margaret Cameron’s lens
Jane Austen with her quill pen, Julia Margaret Cameron with a bulky, wooden box camera steered the development of English fiction and the nascent science of photography toward the realistic modalities we know today.
If, perchance, Jane Austen and Julia Margaret Cameron never struck you as kindred souls, the thought never occurred to me, either. On the surface, their lives were marked by few things in common besides the fact that these two women resided in southern England.
Miniature Portrait of Jane Austen, 19th century.
The Morgan Library and Museum.
Jane Austen (1775-1817) was the gentile daughter of a Church of England clergyman. She lived a very insular life in the county of Hampshire. Austen seldom traveled far from her birthplace, Steventon, and the village of Chawton, where she spent her final years, quietly writing and revising her six novels.
A visit to the nearby resort of Bath or to London was a very big deal for Jane Austen.
If Austen personified the "Little England" temperament, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) embodied the expansive attitudes of the British Empire.
George Frederic Watts, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1850-52
Cameron was born in India, the daughter an official of the Bengal Civil Service. She married another member of the Anglo-Indian elite, twenty years her senior, by whom she had five children. Five orphaned children of relatives and an Irish beggar child named Mary Ryan were added to her brood, quite a difference from the life style of the unwed, childless Austen.
Julia Margaret Cameron was a take-charge person of decided opinions and not shy about expressing them. Overflowing with energy and ambition - and generosity - Cameron was a true memsahib.
The two exhibitions, each occupying one of the first floor galleries at the Morgan, brilliantly complement each other.
Ed Voves, Photo (2025)
Gallery view of Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron
at the Morgan Library and Museum.
Arresting Beauty draws on the vast holdings of Cameron photographs from the Victoria and Albert Museum. The exhibition has been shown at a number of other museums before coming to the Morgan. An especially notable feature of the exhibit is the display of Cameron's bronze camera lens, made in France.
Many of the iconic images which Cameron first beheld with her camera lens are on display, along with lesser known though equally impressive ones. When Arresting Beauty concludes at the Morgan, the exhibit photos will return to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The V&A curators will withdraw the pictures from public view as part of a multi-year conservation process.
So if Cameron's photo of a bored, peevish little girl dressed-up like an angel by Raphael is one of your favorites, see it now!
Ed Voves, Photo (2025)
Julia Margaret Cameron’s I Wait, 1872
It should be noted - not by way of criticism - that all the works in Arresting Beauty are by Cameron. The absence of photos by her contemporaries, Roger Fenton, Clementina Hawarden and others, somewhat mutes the revolutionary impact of Cameron's pictures. But other exhibitions, such as From this Moment, Painting is Dead at the Barnes Foundation (2019), frequently provide such a comparative focus.
By contrast, A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250 is a vintage Morgan enterprise. Walking through this enchanting evocation of Austen's world brings to mind similar tributes at the Morgan to Charlotte Brontë and other literary masters. Morgan exhibitions of this caliber deserve to be treasured, not merely enjoyed.
Ed Voves, Photo (2025)
Gallery view of A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250, showing a letter from Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen and a replica of Jane Austen’s Pelisse
Surviving artifacts once owned by Jane Austen are so rare, that several of the most notable items on view in the Morgan exhibit are reproductions. The actual objects are carefully preserved at Jane Austen's House, Chawton, England.
Jane Austen’s silk pelisse, detail. Reconstruction created by
Hilary Davidson, 2018. Photography by Luke Shear.
Given the exactitude with which the copy of Austen's silk pelisse was created, as shown by a fascinating video, the display of a replica is not a significant omission. Of course, every "Janeite" would love to see the original, while skeptics of the Jane Austen "cult" are quick to note that the 100% provenance of this elegant garment has yet to be absolutely proven.
However, untoward negativity about Austen memorabilia, along with churlish rebukes of Cameron for getting finger prints on her glass plate negatives, will simply not be tolerated in this review!
Jane Austen, Letter to Cassandra Austen, Bath, June 2, 1799.
Morgan Library and Museum, Photography by Janny Chiu
There are a number of autograph letters and other authentic documents written by Jane Austen. But these are few in number, of necessity. This brings us to a painful head-shaking moment, which ultimately confronts all Austen scholars and enthusiasts: the destruction of the greater part of her letters.
Cassandra Austen, the author's sister, carefully sifted through her impressive archive of Austen's letters. She kept 160 and burned the rest. This occurred late in Cassandra's life, during the 1840's. By then, the identity of "A Lady" was established as the author of Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and the rest of the immortal novels. Austen's reputation was beginning to soar. Why destroy her letters?
The motivation was certainly not sibling envy or anger. The wall text of the Morgan exhibit quotes Cassandra on the day following Jane's death, "She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow. It is as if I have lost a part of myself."
The act of destroying correspondence after a person's death was actually a routine matter during the 1800's. But Cassandra Austen's action perfectly illustrates the law of unintended consequences. In seeking to safeguard her sister's privacy, she created the mystery and mystique of Jane Austen.
Ed Voves, Photo (2025)
Gallery views of A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250
In a surviving letter, Jane Austen stated that she wrote for "fame" not financial profit. This remark may well have been a joke between sisters, considering that her name did not appear on the title pages of her novels. We do know that Austen had a wonderful sense of humor, richly endowed with an awareness of the human comedy.
The Regency Age, in which Austen lived, certainly supplied abundant grist for the mill of ironical commentary. Here are two examples from the Morgan exhibition.
Ed Voves, Photo (2025)
French language translation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility
by Isabelle de Montolieu, 1815
One of the fascinating objects on view at the Morgan is the French translation of Sense and Sensibility. A then-famous Swiss novelist, Isabelle de Montolieu, largely rewrote the novel to suit her taste, making Marianne Dashwood the main character, rather than her sister, Eleanor. De Montolieu boldly placed her name under the title of what she admitted was a "free translation." Austen was not consulted and likely never knew of this outrageous act of literary piracy.
Another Regency-era scandal infiltrated the quiet world of Jane Austen. It is documented in the exhibition by an engraving made by William Blake of the celebrated "Mrs. Q". Austen saw the original painting in 1813. She was much taken by the portrait, believing it to be a fair resemblance of Jane Bennet (aka Mrs. Bingley) in Pride and Prejudice.
William Blake, Portrait of Mrs. Q., 1820
The Morgan Library & Museum.
"Mrs Bingley is exactly herself," Austen wrote, comparing her protagonist to the visage of Mrs Q, "size,
shaped face, features & sweetness; there never was a greater likeness...
Never a greater likeness? On the surface, perhaps. Mrs Q was Georgiana Quentin, the wife of British cavalry officer, serving in the campaigns against Napoleon. While her hero husband was fighting at Waterloo, Mrs Quentin was serving the British government in another capacity - as the mistress of the Prince Regent.
What these two less-than-admirable incidents illustrate is the kind of tawdry subject matter which might have infused the letters and other private writings of Jane Austen. Family gossip, anxiety over health, the price of dining in London and, perhaps, the lack of a husband with a sizable income - these may also have figured in the many letters consigned to the flames.
Not exactly the stuff of literary immortality.
Instead of being remembered merely as a Regency-era figure, Jane Austen's reputation has grown with each generation until she has become revered like Shakespeare as "not of an age but for all time."
Ed Voves, Photo (2025)
Gallery view of A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250,
showing a display of modern editions of Pride and Prejudice
The Morgan exhibit presents a fitting tribute to the"global" Jane Austen. A awesome array of popular editions of Pride and Prejudice testifies to the world-wide reach and enduring appeal of Austen and her beloved novels.
These wonderful books are on loan to the Morgan from an archive of Austen documents and memorabilia, collected by a great Jane Austen enthusiast named Alberta H. Burke. This collection was later donated to Goucher College in Baltimore.
The Pride and Prejudice display may also bring a smile or two to your lips, in keeping with Austen's remarkable comedic ability. I am still trying to decide which book cover is the funnier, the 1969 Italian edition which presents Eliza Bennet as a domintrix or the Serbian cover with an image of Jane Austen on what appears to be a 1950's black and white TV with bad reception.
Can the same glowing accolade that Ben Jonson bestowed on Shakespeare be extended to Julia Margaret Cameron, as well as Jane Austen? I certainly believe so. But rather than trying to prove this by a close study of Cameron's oeuvre, I will take a different approach.
Earlier in this essay, I stated that Jane Austen's reputation benefited from the "law of unintended consequences." So too, did that of Julia Margaret Cameron.
Ed Voves, Photo (2025)
Gallery view of Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron
at the Morgan Library and Museum.
Although Cameron had never touched a camera before receiving one as a Christmas present in 1863, she was not a complete amateur. She numbered the Swedish photographer, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, among her many friends. Before she began taking photos of her own, Cameron had practiced developing copies of Rejlander's from his glass-plate negatives.
Since Rejlander was famous for his tableau-vivant versions of Old Master paintings, it would have been natural for Cameron to follow suit. But it did not work out that way.
In a famous quote - which the Morgan uses in the exhibition title - Cameron proclaimed "I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied."
Ed Voves, Photo (2025)
Julia Margaret Cameron’s Angel at the Tomb (detail), 1870
Try though she might, and Cameron did try, "beauty" resisted her "arrest."
Cameron's attempts to use Bible stories and Arthurian legends as her theme seldom worked. When she tried to reprise Michelangelo's Erythraean Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel, the result did not evoke the Renaissance. Nor did this strikingly modern picture, dating to 1864, correspond to mid-Victorian aesthetics.
Contrasting views of Michelangelo’s Erythraean Sibyl and Julia Margaret Cameron’s A Sibyl after the manner of Michelangelo, 1864.
In 1877, an article in the American news journal, Harper's Weekly, astutely commented upon the reception of Cameron's photos at a London exhibition.
Photographers particularly turned up their noses at them, and held them
as examples of the very worst photographs possible; and yet withal there was a
mysterious quality about them which one could scarcely explain without
analyzing them carefully. There was an amount of art feeling so suggestive that
it claimed attention and admiration in spite of the faults which were apparent,
and this very suggestiveness tempted many art critics to go into raptures over
her work as something beyond the range of ordinary photographic achievement.
The "mysterious quality ... beyond the range of ordinary photographic achievement" was a manifestation of Cameron's innate genius. Cameron's talent lay in unlocking the true character of the people posing before her camera. Not tableau-vivants or role playing, but the real people beneath the often ridiculous costumes she induced them to wear.
To pose for Cameron, according to her friend and neighbor, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was to be a "victim." But in the course of these agonizing photo sessions, Cameron's creative alchemy seldom failed. Drawing on her inner "mystery", Cameron portrayed an ancient sibyl in modern garb. Taking her talents a step further, Cameron infused a sense of the ethereal, ineffable human soul into her portrait of Alice Liddel, posing as St. Agnes.
Julia Margaret Cameron, St. Agnes, 1872
The "mysterious quality ... beyond the range of ordinary" characterized the lives of Jane Austen and Julia Margaret Cameron. The origin of this "mysterious quality" is beyond the scope of an essay like this. But I have no doubt that the spiritual lives of Austen and Cameron instilled in them a sense of vision that raised their creative works to the status of high art.
In a beautiful touch, the Morgan curators have projected the words of Jane Austen's memorial from the north aisle of Winchester Cathedral on to the gallery floor of the Morgan.
Ed Voves, Photo (2025)
The words of the memorial for Jane Austen at Winchester Cathedral,
projected on to the floor of the Morgan Library and Museum
Austen's memorial makes no mention of her literary talent or publishing success. Instead, it makes note of her "charity, devotion, faith and purity" which her family hoped would render "her soul acceptable in the sight of her Redeemer."
These heartfelt words are equally applicable to Julia Margaret Cameron who is buried in a neglected grave in Sri Lanka.
"Charity, devotion, faith and purity." Words to live by, words to create by, of an age and for all time.
***
Text and original images: Copyright of Ed
Voves, all rights reserved.
Unless otherwise noted all of the photos
exhibiting in the Julia Margaret Cameron exhibition are from the Royal
Photographic Society Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Introductory Image: Henry Herschel Hay Cameron
(British 1852-1911) Julia Margaret Cameron, c. 1873. Albumen Print:
20 1/16 x 16 in. (50.96 x 40.64 cm.) V&A
Ed Voves, Photo (2025) Gallery views of A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250 and Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron
at the Morgan Library and Museum. Shown in the pictures are replica of Jane Austen’s writing table from
Jane Austen’s House, Chawton, U.K. and Julia Margaret Cameron’s camera lens, 5
½ x 5 ½ x 11 13/16 inches ( 14 x 14 x 300 cm.) V&A collection.
Anonymous, Miniature Portrait of Jane Austen,
19th century. The Morgan Library and Museum. AZ078
George Frederic Watts (British, 1817-1904) Julia
Margaret Cameron, 1850-52. Oil on canvas: 24 x 20 in. (610 x 508 mm.) National
Portrait Gallery, London. NPO 505046
Ed Voves, Photo (2025) Gallery view of Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron
at the Morgan Library and Museum.
Ed Voves, Photo (2025) Julia Margaret Cameron’s
I Wait, 1872. Albumen print: 24 x 19
15/16 in. (60.9. x 50.7. cm.) V&A
Ed Voves, Photo (2025) Gallery views of A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250,
showing a display of an autograph letter from Jane Austen to Cassandra
Austen and replica of Jane Austen’s
Pelisse
Jane Austen’s silk pelisse, detail view.
Reconstruction created by Hilary Davidson, 2028. On loan from Jane Austen”s
House, Chawton, U.K. Photography by Luke Shear.
Jane Austen (1775-1817) Autograph letter to
Cassandra Austen, Bath, June 2, 1799. Morgan Library and Museum, MA 977.4
Photography by Janny Chiu
Ed Voves, Photo (2025) Gallery view of A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250, at
the Morgan Library and Museum
Ed Voves, Photo (2025) French language translation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility by Isabelle de Montolieu, 1815. From the Alberta H. Burke collection, Goucher College, Baltimore.
William Blake (1757-1827) Portrait of Mrs. Q. (Harriet Quentin), 1820. Stipple
etching/engraving with mezzotint. The Morgan Library & Museum. 1998:36:4.
Ed Voves, Photo (2025) Gallery view of the A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250 exhibition,
showing a display of modern editions of Pride
and Prejudice in various European languages.
Art Eyewitness Image, showing Orgoglio e
pregiudizio. (Milan: Editrice Piccoli, 1969), and Gordost I predasuda
(Belgrade: Knjiga za Svakog, 1964) Both books from the Alberta and Henry Burke
collection, Goucher College, Baltimore, Md.
Ed Voves, Photo (2025) Gallery view of Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron
at the Morgan Library and Museum.
Ed Voves, Photo (2025) Julia Margaret Cameron’s
Angel at the Tomb (detail), 1870.
Art Eyewitness Image. Contrasting views of Michelangelo’s
Erythraean Sibyl and Julia Margaret
Cameron’s A Sibyl after the manner of Michelangelo, 1864.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) St.
Agnes (Alice Liddel) 1872. Albumen print: 21 15/16 x 17 in. (55.7 x 43. cm.)
Ed Voves, Photo (2025) Gallery view of the A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250 exhibition,
showing a projection of the words of the memorial for Jane Austen on the north
aisle of Winchester Cathedral.
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