When fourteen-year-old Mary Hillier delivered a message to photographer Julia Margaret Cameron’s door, little did she know what her life would become…

Julia Margaret Cameron received her first camera as a gift when she was forty-eight but her love affair with the medium had already spanned several decades and continents. An enthusiast for this newly invented device, she travelled the world befriending experts who taught her the magic and the science of the lens such as the astronomer John Herschel, and pioneering photographers like her brother in law the Earl Somers and the Swedish risk-taking artist Oscar Rejlander.

Beginning as Julia’s parlour maid, Mary went on to become the photographer’s leading model and the focus of the artist’s creative passion. For Julia, Mary personified the heavenly qualities of her quiet corner of England. For Mary, Julia’s influence would echo throughout her life. This is a biography of two women who experienced beauty, love, loss and fame, and created photographs that, in Julia’s own words, ‘should electrify you with delight and startle the world’. Spanning the French Revolution to the 1930s, Light and Love tells the story of a rare partnership of a pioneer and her muse, and how their relationship would change the course of both of their lives.