Afterimage

Sarah Robertson is the editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

Helen Humphreys is a poet and the author of the critically acclaimed
Leaving Earth, winner of the Toronto Book Award. Her second novel, a
haunting tale set in Victorian England not long after the publication of
Darwin’s The Origin of Species, skilfully evokes the longings and
anxieties of that intellectually turbulent age.

Annie Phelan has secured employment as a housemaid at the neglected
country estate of Isabelle and Elton Dashell. Whereas Annie’s former
employer was a repressive, bible-thumping harridan, the Dashells are
freethinkers. Elton, cartographer and melancholy idealist, dreams of
creating an authoritative map of the world. His restless, troubled wife
is an ardent practitioner of photography, a fledgling art that
compensates for the losses she has endured.

Estranged from each other, Isabelle and Elton draw Annie into their
respective obsessions. Posing as such iconic figures as Ophelia and
Madonna, Annie quickly establishes herself as a photographic subject
most likely to fulfil Isabelle’s feverish quest for “human truth.”
(The elaborate, stylized photo shoots are loosely based on the work of
the Victorian photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron, who turned to her
own housemaid for subject matter.) Elton nourishes Annie’s own
obsession—reading—and assists her in her search for the family she
lost to the Irish famine. In return, Annie assuages Elton’s loneliness
and participates in his imaginative reconstruction of the doomed
Franklin Expedition.

The complex triangle involving husband, wife, and housemaid is suffused
with erotic undercurrents and class tensions. Prior to the tragedy that
forces a new dynamic, there is a suggestion that art both empowers and
offers “an excuse to hide from life.” As this resonant and
gracefully written novel draws to a close, it is made eminently clear
that Isabelle’s photographs and Elton’s maps were a substitute not
just for religious faith, but for life itself.