Creating narratives from the Victorian photographic archive: re-imaginings of Julia Margaret Cameron’s work in Ulverton (1992) and The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (2014)

Abstract

Contemporary historical fictions increasingly employ affective relations with Victorian photographs as nodal points within their narratives, introducing an archive-like structure of traces to the texts. The evocation of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron’s visual traces in contemporary neo-Victorian texts exemplifies this shift towards an archival subjectivity, particularly because such qualities are inherent in her original material. Photography critics have long noted that Cameron’s evocative portraits and illustrations suggest blurred relations between models and characters, outward appearance and the self, and the material and the ethereal. Drawing on work on creative readings of photograph albums, and on the idea of ‘rhythms’ of pictoriality in a text, I suggest that Cameron’s photographic albums create fluid meaning and narrative from a dialogue of image traces, intended to be interpreted by the viewer’s empathetic imagination. Taking this further, I argue that this Victorian form of visual narrative creates a kind of grounding for the modern use of pictoriality in fiction. I identify two novels that evoke Cameron’s character and style as part of multi-stranded narratives, Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton (1992) and Michelle Lovric’s The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (2014), discerning within them structured compositions of subjective ekphrastic images which produce a form of novel-as-archive. In this form, narrative meaning is created from a focus on the successive scrutiny of images. In an unorthodox and cross-temporal relationship between word and image, the narrative aesthetics of a Victorian photographer become productive of plays of identity, representation, and structure in contemporary fiction.