BLOOD MUSE - JULIET MARGARET CAMERON'S GREAT GRAND DAUGHTER

Jo is the great, great ,great granddaughter of the great, great ,great Juliet Margaret Cameron. By chance I met Jo, two years ago and without knowing of her connection to JMC I felt drawn by her free, lively spirit and sensual way of looking at life. We spent an afternoon together. I learnt how loss and suffering had made JMC need to create, as if to fill the hole that death had created .I was saddened that she was thought less of by her family, though it's so often the case for anyone who goes their own way and doesn't fit into what the family seems to stand for. In Jo’s words…. Julia Margaret's only daughter Julia died in childbirth - a portrait of the child that killed her,, hangs on my sitting room wall. Her husband Charles Norman, who greatly resembles my handsome brother Charles, was desolated by her loss. It was clearly a love match. Pictures taken of Julia and Charles, by JMC, winding herself around her husband like a little sensual cat, were most unusual for the mid 19th-century. But then JMC never did what anyone expected of her. She was lucky enough to have a loving tolerant husband. My great grandfather Archie, JMC's grandson, married a snobbish woman called Mildred Wake. Anything even slightly out of the most proper, philistine, upper class propriety was stamped on hard, and I think this is why following generations were almost ashamed of JMC and she was treated as an object of fun. This made me feel very cross as I found out more about her. I felt intense admiration for her - not just for her photography, but for her great kindness and generosity towards orphaned Anglo-Indian children and other waifs and strays. She adored beauty, and that trait was passed down. JMC was business minded as well as everything else. She didn't allow social propriety or her gender to get in the way of her life as a working artist. What she did was no genteel hobby but a source of revenue as well as satisfaction. She was also scientific, corresponding even as a very young woman with Sir John Herschel, who invented and named photography. She travelled without any sense of boundaries, in a way that I long to now. If I can just produce one creative thing that people really like, I will feel I have lived up to her, but my medium is words. I love her energy. The fact that she was middle aged and had to get child stuff out of the way to get going. I think that is very common for creative women. Having and bringing up children is, or should be, a supreme act of creation. It needs to lessen as an overwhelming passion to allow other creativity to emerge.