“Photography has without doubt made her a seer; she is a woman of the future, someone leaning into time, beyond others, precarious, unafraid to fall.”
In 1860, when they are just eight and ten, Lucy Strange and her brother Thomas are orphaned. Left now in the care of their uncle, the children begin slowly, frighteningly, to find their place in the difficult world. And so begins Lucy's adolescent journey of discovery, one which will take her away from her childhood home in Australia, first to London, then to Bombay and finally, to her death, at the age of twenty-two. It is a life abbreviated, but not a life diminished. Lucy is a remarkable character, forthright, gifted and exuberant; she touches the lives of all who know her.
Written in confident, finely interwoven and intricate layers, Sixty Lights is the powerful chronicle of a modern and independent young woman’s life in the Victorian world. Objects evoke memories and hint at the future in a narrative that flows between pleats in time. Through her observation of such objects Lucy’s photographic vision is apparent. Her world is a series of still images which one day, printed on albumen paper, she will leave as affecting mementoes of her own extraordinary life.
