Afterimage: A Novel - Softcover

Humphreys, Helen

3.72

1,108 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312420641 ISBN 13: 9780312420642

Publisher: Picador, 2002

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Inspired by the life of Julia Margaret Cameron, Afterimage is the bold and provocative story of Annie Phelan, a maid in the home of Isabel and Eldon Dashell. Isabel is experimenting with the new medium of photography, and is inspired by Annie, who becomes her muse. The two form a close relationship, but when Eldon devises his own plans for the young maid, Annie nearly loses herself, until disaster reveals her power over the Dashells’ work and hearts.

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About the Author:

Helen Humphreys is the author of four collections of poetry and a previous novel, Leaving Earth, which won the Toronto Book Award and was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Kingston, Ontario.

From Publishers Weekly:

Inspired by the Victorian photography of Julia Margaret Cameron, Canadian author Humphreys creatively invents the world behind the images of a costumed house maid. Acknowledging a debt to Jane Eyre, Humphreys sets her beguiling tale in the mid-19th-century English countryside, where doe-eyed Annie Phelan comes to work at Middle Road Farm. What she encounters there is alien to her strict, religious upbringing as a servant after her family died in the Irish famine. Her new mistress, Isabelle, is the unconventional daughter of local gentry and a passionate artist attempting to prove her skill in the new medium of photography. Isabelle uses her house staff as models in elaborately concocted photo shoots and discovers the obedient Annie to be an expressive and intriguing portrait subject. Viewing Annie dressed up as Ophelia, Sappho or the Madonna, 30ish Isabelle begins to feel an attraction to the younger woman the kind of attraction she no longer feels for her husband, Eldon. He is a mapmaker with ambitions to be a world explorer, and he also admires Annie, whom he calls "Phelan" when she becomes a participant in his imaginary expedition to the Arctic. He also helps her to satisfy her own obsession, which is reading, by allowing her to borrow books from his library. The atmosphere that encloses this evolving love triangle is sometimes erotic, sometimes poignant and always complicated by Victorian class issues. A fiery denouement causes Annie to question her past and reconsider her future with Isabelle. Humphreys, author of four books of poetry and the acclaimed novel Leaving Earth, has an impeccable command of imagery, and her prose finds strengths in its subtlety. A hauntingly beautiful reproduction of a Cameron photo on the jacket should pull readers to this finely wrought novel.

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