Julia Margaret Cameron

'I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, 
and at length the longing has been satisfied.'

Julia Margaret Cameron

'Annie my first success'

Ophelia

Pomona (Alice Liddell - the real-life Alice in Wonderland as a young woman)

Poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (a photo he referred to as The Dirty Monk!)

Julia Jackson (niece of Julia Margaret Cameron and mother to writer, Virginia Woolfe)

Vivien and Merlin (featuring Julia's husband Henry Hay Cameron) Photographs illustrating Tennyson's Idylls of the King

Vivien and Merlin (in front of 'the hollow oak' carried in from Tennyson's property next door)

Actress Ellen Terry at the age of 16 in 1864

Ellen Terry and the Beetlewing Gown

Ellen Terry at 16 years of age posing for Julia Margaret Cameron

'Ellen Terry is the most beautiful name in the world; it rings like a chime through the last quarter of the nineteenth century.' George Bernard Shaw

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, John Singer Sargent, 1889

A woman I have always been fascinated with is Dame Ellen Terry (27th February 1847 - 21st July 1928). Ellen Terry was the leading Shakespearean actress in Britain and recently a dress that she wore as Lady Macbeth in 1880s has been restored. This is no ordinary dress but an emerald gown shimmering with the iridescent naturally sloughed-off wings of 1,000 beetles. This magnificent dress took 1,300 hours of painstaking work funded by the National Trust and is now back at on display at Ellen's home in Smallhythe Place in Kent. Oh how I long to see it with my own eyes!

You can read great article about Ellen Terry and this gown from The Guardian here.

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth in the beetlewing dress