‘Take my lens. I bequeath it to my descendents’: Julia Margaret Cameron

Abstract

Woolf, like Katharine Hilbery, knew that through photographs she could, ‘join the present on to this past’ (N&D: 106). Those in the Hilbery family album are fictionalisations of the Pattle sisters and their coterie sweeping over the lawns at Melbury House/Little Holland House, with Julia Margaret Cameron constructed as Queenie Colquhoun (106–7). As early as January 1919, Woolf recognised the comic potential of anecdotes about Freshwater such as she read in the biography of Watts,¹ for instance of the Camerons leaving for Ceylon and taking their coffins with them (D1: 237). She includes the coffin anecdote in Night and Day and develops the joke in Freshwater. She thus overtly constructs Cameron, like Ritchie, as a figure of fun, belittling, mocking and patronising her, while obliquely acknowledging her status by intertextual affiliation.