I thought you cared for me.
The trees are webbed in soft light. They are waiting for their green selves to begin. There are small fat robins on the grass, hopeful for worms. Everywhere the trust in spring, that what is here will be enough, will be all that there is to want.
The stones are still piled up by the fencepost. The note they left is still there. Annie unfolds it carefully, reads the simple words they left, again.
January 3, 1866. Expedition under the command of Captain Eldon Dashell, and with Annie Phelan as Ship’s Company, set out to retrace the last known moments of two of John Franklin’s crew.
Then she removes what she took from Eldon’s library from under her cloak. The sheet of cartes he had made. The images of him standing very upright, one hand on the top of the world. With the pencil she also took she writes around the edges of their original note. February 15, 1866. Captain Dashell died a week ago. I have… There are really only two things to say now. I have gone on. Or, I have gone back. Annie leans against the fencepost, looks out across the empty field, looks back towards the bulk of the house. I have gone on, she writes.
And then she goes back.
*
The glasshouse wasn’t touched by the fire. Some of the panes of glass cracked with the heat from across the garden and some of the panes are blurred with smoke stains. Isabelle hasn’t been in here since the fire. Nothing has changed. The straw is still on the floor by one wall. The bench is arranged on the straw, all set for the angel that was Gus to kneel down beside it. Her camera stands patiently in front of the empty scene, waiting for it to arrive.
At first Isabelle doesn’t see Annie Phelan standing against the far wall, so intent is she on surveying for damage. When she does finally notice her, she just stands and stares, puts her hand into her dress pocket, and runs her thumb along the edge of the letter there, the letter she took from Eldon’s desk. Miss Annie Phelan c/o Mr. Eldon Dashell it says on the envelope. It’s postmarked Country Clare, Ireland. On the overleaf the name of the sender, Phelan. Isabelle has steamed the letter open and read the contents, knows what they say so thoroughly that she could open her mouth and recite them.
Dear Sir,
I was given your letter by the County Clerk to whom you wrote concerning a certain Annie Phelan with whom you are acquainted.
My name is Michael Phelan. I have reason to believe that I am Annie’s brother. I was told my entire family died in the famine, so you can imagine how happy your letter has made me for forging this new and unexpected hope.
Please be so kind as to pass this along to my sister so she may write to me at the address below.
Respectfully yours,
Michael Phelan
Isabelle wants to close her hand around this letter, draw it out, hand it to Annie, say—“Here, this is what you’ve been waiting for.” But instead she says, “Tess doesn’t have to go. I won’t make her go.”
Annie looks at the straw on the ground. The light coming through the roof makes the straw a tangle of gold at her feet.
She remembers the architecture of this scene they were preparing for. She remembers the moment she stood in the studio, looking at the straw and the dull light hefting through the window, the moment before she went out to the coal cellar in search of Isabelle. “Take my photograph,” she says.
“As who?”
“As me.” Annie tilts her head up, looks at Isabelle.
The light this afternoon is beautiful. Clean. Every object caught by it seems sharp and distinct. The spring sky, through the glass roof, is as blue as the sea.
Isabelle stands behind her camera. Don’t leave me, she thinks. I can’t lose you too. She moves the camera forward so that Annie’s face fills the frame. She screws down the focus. It takes a few tries to get the stopper out of the collodion bottle, but she accomplishes this, coats the glass plate with the sticky liquid. She plunges it into the silver nitrate bath, slides the glass into the plate holder, and pops that into the back of the camera.
Annie holds her head up as straight as she can. Perhaps, for once, for the first time, the photograph of this moment will be the same image to her and Isabelle. They will see the identical thing. It will not be simply persuasion. It will not be one person describing and one person believing that story. It will be a place to start out from, a moment unclouded by desire. A clear, clear day. That is something to hope for. That is something to want.
Isabelle has her hand on the camera lens. “That’s good,” she says. “You look like a heroine. Like someone who has just saved a child. Don’t move.”
Annie thinks of the night she kissed Isabelle, how that moment when she felt fully alive she is not allowed to speak of again. How Isabelle kept a room full of carriages and toys that belonged to children she can’t forget and won’t remember. And that room, where they kissed, is gone now, destroyed by the fire. Nothing left of that evening. How here, in the studio, this place where they’ve been the most indmate, in front of the camera, Isabelle will let Annie be anyone, except herself. Annie has existed for Isabelle, not as who she is, but only as who Isabelle wanted her to be at a particular moment. Now, again, she is to be a heroine, a girl who has rescued a child from a deadly fire. Early on, when Annie was full of admiration for Isabelle’s competent strength in the world, when Annie was grateful just to be noticed, it was enough just to be paid attention to. Now it is not. That kiss felt real, was real. She wants Isabelle to admit this, to admit that it was Annie she kissed. But Isabelle Dashell has looked so hard at Annie Phelan and has never once seen her at all.
Annie thinks of Eldon, of all the places he imagined going and never went to. Now he is buried beside his children in the small village cemetery. It rained on the day of his funeral. Annie had stood beside Isabelle while the coffin was lowered into the muddy grave. On the way down it bumped against the sides, against roots thick as fists, the dark eye of a stone embedded into the earth wall. Annie had cried. Isabelle had turned back for the carriage at the first shovel load of earth on the coffin. She had flinched at the sound of it.
Eldon would have been proud that Annie had rescued the boy from the fire. She had behaved in a loyal way to those in her charge. She had been a good member of the expedition.What she thinks now is that she will go back to Ireland by herself, back to County Clare, to try and find out what happened to her family. Eldon would like that. And even though the letters he sent there were never answered, if she went herself and made enquiries, there might be someone who would recall the Phelans. Yes, this is what she will do.
Annie holds her head up as straight as she can. This photograph is all Isabelle will allow her to give. This is all Isabelle will have to remember her by. She wants it to be a good likeness. “I’m ready, Isabelle,” she says.
The winged boy falls to earth. Isabelle watches his slow flight down, the streaks of smoke articulate from the trailing ends of his feathery arms. The knot his small body makes in the air.
It is the perfect photograph, and she has missed it.
This is what she has always feared. That she will not be able, no matter how she wills it or orchestrates it, to create an image as pure and true as this. That what she does is not really about life, about living. It is about holding on to something long after it has already left.
Like grief Like hope.
Life is the unexpected generosity of a kiss.
It is the falling moment. Unrecorded.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron for their haunting inspiration.
Thanks to the Corporation of Yaddo, where some of this book was written.
I would like to thank M. Lindsay Lambert for his expertise in Victorian photography, and my grandfather, Ronald Brett, for his imaginings of Sussex life in 1865.
Thanks, as always, to Frances Hanna.
In particular, I am grateful to my editor, Phyllis Bruce. Her kindness, thoroughness, and keen judgement have made me a better writer, and Afterimage a b
etter book.
International Acclaim for Afterimage
“So rich with intimate detail…. Helen Humphreys gives us the gift of her unique imagination in a complex story, beautifully told.”
—Ottawa Citizen
“Brilliant … immensely touching…. Annie, despite her resemblance to Mary Hillier, the young housemaid who was Cameron’s most frequent model, is fully imagined and gloriously herself.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Accomplished…. Humphreys delves boldly into the tumultuous Victorian era, bringing to life an aristocratic couple ravaged by the intensity of their aesthetic obsessions.”
—The Washington Post
“Inspired by the work of Julia Margaret Cameron, this urgent, well-made novel charts the boundaries where light becomes shadow, and the known can suddenly appear awful and astonishing.”
—The New Yorker
“A beautiful, powerful, and accomplished novel.”
—National Post
“A breath of fresh air…. tale.” Humphreys teases out a compelling
—The Guardian (UK)
“Lyrical…. This beautifully written novel edges toward saying something profound about the relationships between art and life, men and women, the powerful and the disempowered.”
—The Economist
“Afterimage wonderfully suggests the texture of Victorian life, as well as the intensity of emotion generated between artist and subject.”
—USA Today
“The book has a compelling afterimage of its own. What remains is a vivid impression of Annie, in its own way as haunting as the photographs that inspired her.”
—Time Out (New York)
“The atmosphere that encloses this evolving love triangle is sometimes erotic, sometimes poignant, and always complicated by Victorian class issues…. [Humphreys] has an impeccable command of imagery, and her prose finds strength in its subtlety.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Lushly suspenseful and tender…. Afterimage demands close attention.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A finely paced, carefully researched, and exquisitely told historical tale of ambition, longing, and unrealized dreams.”
—The Antigonish Review
“[Humphreys] has produced a fascinating novel that works on many levels…. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
Author’s Note
The photographs described in Afterimage are loosely imagined renderings of a series of photographs taken by the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron of her housemaid, Mary Hillier.
The quotes from Sappho are taken from a translation by Mary Barnard.
The quoted passages of the whaling diary are from the Journal of the Margaret Rait—1840—1844 by Captain James Doane Coffin.
The quoted passages and descriptions of McClintock’s voyage in search of Franklin are from The Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in the Arctic Seas: A Narrative of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir John Franklin and His Companions by Captain Francis Leopold McClintock; London, 1859.
The quoted passages from John Franklin are taken from Arctic Breakthrough: Franklin’s Expeditions 1819–1847 by Paul Nanton.
P.S. Ideas, Interviews, & Features
Helen Humphreys Discusses Afterimage
The question of the unusual nature of the relationship was always at the heart of the story of Isabelle and her Irish maid, Annie.
Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs were the primary inspiration behind Afterimage. What was it about them that captured your imagination?
Cameron’s photographs are quite famous, and so I had seen individual images in the past, but the first time I saw an exhibition was in 1998, and it included a series of her maid, Mary Hillier. I started to cast around, trying to find out more about Hillier, but because she was a maid there was little available on her life. There was, however, a lot of information about Cameron, and so I started there—but the question of the unusual nature of the relationship was always at the heart of the story of Isabelle and her Irish maid, Annie.
All the photographs in the novel were based on Cameron’s actual photographs. In all my historical novels I try to be faithful to one particular thing, and in Afterimage it was the real-life photographs and the photographic process that Cameron used to create them.
In your novel, what is the relationship between Isabelle’s photography and her husband Eldon’s cartography?
One is an art form that is in its death throes (cartography), and one is an art form that is just beginning (photography). I liked the idea of the tension that opposition could create within a household.
Isabelle’s confidence in her artistic vision wavers when others don’t take her seriously. Was this also true of the real-life photographer Cameron?
Cameron was an anomaly at the time. There weren’t women photographers when she took it up. In fact, photography itself was in its infancy as an art form and a profession, and perhaps this is why she was accepted within it. Territory hadn’t been properly staked out yet. Everything was still very experimental. So Cameron was able to take up photography relatively late in life, at the age of forty-eight, and become a success. Where Cameron didn’t find inclusion, and in Afterimage where Isabelle Dashell also has trouble, is within the world of the male allegorical painters, such as Watts. They didn’t take photography, regardless of the gender of the photographer, seriously as an art form.
How did you tackle the research for Afterimage, which delves into everything from Ireland’s Great Hunger to Arctic exploration?
There was a massive amount of research required. But what I did initially, to maintain some order with it, was to break the book down into subjects—early photography, Cameron’s photography, life in Victorian England, the Irish potato famine, Franklin’s doomed trip to find the Northwest Passage, the history of map-making. There was a lot to learn and it took the better part of two years.
“Everything was still very experimental. So Cameron was able to take up photography relatively late in life, at the age of forty-eight, and become a success.”
“I think Eldon has never been very comfortable in his own skin.
Several of the characters in Afterimage long to be someone other than themselves, most intriguingly Eldon, who in one passage says that he wishes he were Annie’s equal. Why?
Annie has no wish to be anyone other than herself. Her struggle is in finding out what that self comprises. I think Eldon has never been very comfortable in his own skin. He was a sickly child, and his physical weakness has kept him from the adventurous life that he desired. He feels a real kinship with Annie but also feels that their respective societal positions prevent their closeness. He is not a man who is tied to his societal position, and I think he would relinquish it if he could. He would change his circumstances if it would allow him to make a better connection with someone. This is where he differs from Isabelle and is really a much more sympathetic character. She has no wish to change but, rather, requires change from others.
In the beginning, Annie seems a pawn in the hands of her masters. At what point and how are the roles reversed?
Yes, initially they use her for their own purposes. But they underestimate her intelligence and her willingness to learn. And so, while they’re using her, she’s educating herself, to the point, at the end of the book, where she feels confident making decisions for herself and rebelling against their idea of who she is. By playing with identity, trying on the roles both Isabelle and Eldon give to her, Annie is actually able to discover an identity of her own and act from the newfound power of that place.
With which of the novel’s three main characters do you feel the most connection?
I feel connected to all three of them, but I suppose that I probably am most like Isabelle Dashell in that I am driven, as she is driven, to create. It doesn’t feel like a choice, more of a compulsion, and I think that is how it is for her. All of her best energies get put into the m
aking of her photographs, and the vision she has for her work drives all of her decisions. When I was a young writer, this was very much how it was for me.
Do you take photographs yourself, and if so, do you see any parallels between photography and writing?
I used to do quite a lot of photography and did my own developing. I was a bit obsessed with construction sites at one time, and I remember taking a lot of photographs of scaffolding. I liked the contrast in photography between the capturing of an image and the rather lengthy process of developing that image. And I liked that the taking of the photograph was all about light, and the developing of the image was done in the dark. Of course all that has changed now with digital photography and printers. But there was something very satisfying about watching an image slowly reveal itself in the developing fluid. I suppose in that way it was like writing, although to be honest, it never felt to me like writing at all.
“I suppose that I probably am most like Isabelle Dashell in that I am driven, as she is driven, to create.”
“I love art in all its forms, and I take a lot of inspiration from it.
Do you find that other art forms often influence your writing in the way that Cameron’s photographs did Afterimage?
I am constantly influenced by other art forms. Art cross-pollinates. I love visual art and spend time in galleries whenever I’m in New York or London or other big cities. I listen to music, sometimes even while I write. I see a lot of films and go to the theatre when I can. I love art in all its forms, and I take a lot of inspiration from it.
Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle Page 21