Editing Julia Margaret Cameron (section)

=== Early impact ===
Cameron's niece, [[Julia Prinsep Stephen]] (née Jackson; 1846–1895), wrote a biography of Cameron that appeared in the first edition of the ''Dictionary of National Biography'', 1886.<ref>Stephen, L. (1886). [http://worldcatlibraries.org/oclc/57472138&referer=brief_results Dictionary of national biography: vol. VIII. Burton – Cantwell]. London: Smith, Elder, & Co.</ref>

A few years later, [[George Bernard Shaw]] reviewed a posthumous exhibition of Cameron's, writing:<blockquote>While the portraits of Herschel, Tennyson and Carlyle beat hollow anything I have ever seen, right on the same wall, and virtually in the same frame, there are photographs of children with no clothes on, or else the underclothes by way of propriety, with palpably paper wings, most inartistically grouped and artlessly labelled as angels, saints or fairies. No-one would imagine that the artist who produced the marvellous Carlyle would have produced such childish trivialities.<ref name="The Complete Photographs" />{{Rp|433}}</blockquote>Virginia Woolf wrote a comic portrayal of the "Freshwater circle" in her only play ''Freshwater''. Later, in collaboration with [[Roger Fry]], Woolf also edited the first major collection of Cameron's photographs, ''Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women,'' published in 1926.<ref name="Oxford Dictionary of National Biography" /><ref>Woolf, V., & Fry, R. E. (1926). [http://worldcatlibraries.org/oclc/83420939&referer=brief_results Victorian photographs of famous men & women]. New York: Harcourt, Brace.</ref> In the introduction to this collection, Fry wrote that Cameron's allegorical photographs "must all be judged as failures from an aesthetic viewpoint".<ref name="The Complete Photographs" />{{Rp|433}} He was more charitable toward her other work, writing that she had "a wonderful perception of character as it is expressed in form" and that her work was superior to the portraits of [[James Abbott McNeill Whistler]] and Watts.<ref name="The Complete Photographs" />{{Rp|291}}

Despite the publication of this collection, Cameron's work remained obscure until the 1940s.