Afterimage - Softcover

Humphreys, Helen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1554684730 ISBN 13: 9781554684731

Publisher: Phyllis Bruce Books Perennial, 2009

Synopsis

Inspired by the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron, Afterimage is a provocative, passionate, yet delicate Victorian novel. When the young Irish maid Annie Phelan arrives at the country home of Isobelle and Eldon Dashell, she is swept into a world of artistic ambitions and hidden passions. But she also discovers a marriage that has grown distant and two people who see her as a blank slate upon which to project their own desires and failed dreams. Jealousy, longing and sensuality intertwine in this mesmerizing novel of aesthetic obsession and unfulfilled dreams.

About this title

About the Author

HELEN HUMPHREYS’s most recent novel, The Evening Chorus, was nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award and was a national bestseller. Her critically acclaimed memoir, Nocturne, was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award. Previous novels include Coventry, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and a finalist for the Trillium Book Award; Afterimage, which won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; Leaving Earth, which won the Toronto Book Award; and The Lost Garden, which was a Canada Reads selection. The recipient of the Harbourfront Festival Prize for literary excellence, Humphreys 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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About this edition

• Publisher: Phyllis Bruce Books Perennial
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1554684730
• ISBN 13: 9781554684731
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272