Fanny Cornforth was a Victorian supermodel whose face epitomised the vision and life of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In their twenty-five years together, she played many parts from muse, medium and lover to housekeeper and nurse. Due to her care of the artist, he was able to create some of the best known and celebrated art works of the nineteenth century, however at his death Fanny became an outcast, accused of stealing, lying and even murder. Her journey from rural poverty to celebrated beauty gave her a life she could never have dreamed of, but her choice of love above security saw her end her days in an asylum. Her afterlife, in the imagination of those who knew her and those that followed saw her cast as a villainess; Rossetti's folly, an illiterate prostitute who could crack walnut shells in her teeth. It's finally time that the truth is separated from the swirl of lies and that the life of one of the most infamous women of Bohemian London is told, from canvas to asylum.

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.