Arresting Beauty

Based on real people, this reels with romance, period atmosphere, and the spirit of a young woman who teeters between her working-class roots and bohemian high society in Victorian England.

Through the lives of two extraordinary women, and an engaging first-person narrative, Heather Cooper’s Arresting Beauty reveals how some boundaries of class and gender could not be crossed in Victorian England. Inspired by the real-life experiences of celebrated Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and the young girl she took into her Bohemian household, the author handles her subjects with deft diligence and warmth. 

As a ten-year-old, Mary was plucked “from the gutters of Putney and installed in a real house, a grand one” by Julia Margaret Cameron, an esteemed photographer. In Mary’s view, “I was a project, an enthusiasm, one among so many.” In Julia’s, “I must have this child! Yes, yes; look at her, those eyes!” 

Soon after Mary becomes part of Julia’s bohemian household as a maid, they move to the Isle of Wight, where Julia’s friend Alfred Tennyson, a close neighbour, observes that Mary is an “intelligent girl.” In time, after being educated alongside Julia’s own sons, spirited Mary becomes her mistress’s muse, model and assistant while battling class constraints of the age, and experiencing intense romance.

With a rich cast of characters, top-notch dialogue and vivid sense of its protagonist’s conflicts and desires, Arresting Beauty is a fine example of biographical fiction.

-- Joanne Owen, LoveReading

Cooper’s intelligent prose matches her bright, plucky, unpretentious heroine, Mary Ryan, who finds herself serving as parlourmaid in the household of Julia Margaret Cameron. Here she meets the great and the good—Tennyson, Browning—and becomes a model for her maverick mistress’s pioneering photography. Cooper, like her character, respects society’s luminaries rather than idolizing them, preferring to focus on Mary’s private ambitions for self-improvement and security in a world where women, especially those ‘in service’, are unlikely to achieve either. This is a ‘below stairs’ book, not a celebration of the literati. The narrative is beguilingly simple, making Mary’s rapid social progression pleasingly credible, and always engaging. The reader yearns for Mary’s success, and with some nods to Austen along the way, Cooper delivers.

For anyone who knows and loves the Isle of Wight, there had to be a right way to tell the story of life in Julia Margaret Cameron’s Dimbola Lodge, and Tennyson’s Farringford, and Cooper has found it. ARRESTING BEAUTY is a gem.

-- Dominic Minghella, Writer and Producer

Meticulously researched, but also adds psychological insight into Mary Ryan’s inner determination, in her ascent from poverty to ladyhood. I am viewing Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs of Mary with added insight into her strength of character.

-- Dr Brian Hinton, Chair, Julia Margaret Cameron T