While Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs of men usually portrayed Victorian luminaries, her female subjects were most often friends, relatives, or household servants presented in the guise of literary, historical, or biblical figures. Here, she presents her beautiful young housemaid, Mary Hillier, as Sappho, the ancient Greek poet of Lesbos. This profile portrait in the Florentine quattrocento style was likely perhaps inspired by the chromolithographic reproductions of Italian paintings distributed by the Arundel Society, of which Cameron was a member. The image has such presence that Cameron decided to print it despite having cracked the negative.