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This article addresses the complexities confronted when researching and writing the life story of Mary Ryan (1848–1914), the sitter for the photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron. Ryan, a beggar in childhood, became Cameron’s maid, model and assistant, and eventually, following their marriage, was transformed into a British lady. Her apparent Cinderella story has been recited repeatedly by Victorian memoirists and by Cameron’s biographers, yet Ryan’s own account is missing. Despite her middle-class education in Cameron’s household and her upward mobility, she stayed publicly silent regarding her own life story. Was her silence a sign of her continuing lack of social agency or was it an act of resistance to her representation as the Irish beggar maid, positioning her as inferior? Analysing the limited details about Ryan, a feminist journey is embarked upon to seek the most appropriate methodology and voice to reconstruct a life of elusive subjectivity. Navigating sparse material, archival gaps and silences as well as Ryan’s seeming wish for privacy, questions are used to introduce a self-reflexive, hesitant narrative as the appropriate way to tackle and negotiate restrictions placed on nineteenth-century female subjects.

Reconstructing subjectivity from silence: Julia Margaret Cameron, Mary Ryan and the Victorian archive