From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography, by Victoria Olsen <br></br>Julia Margaret Cameron: 19th-century photographer of genius, by Colin Ford

In a flash, a middle-aged Victorian matron transformed herself into the first genuine photographic artist. Or did she? Jan Marsh looks behind the lens

Large solander boxes in museums across the world contain Julia Margaret Cameron's prints from her own glass negatives. Image after image of frontal and profile faces exert a mesmeric effect, for these are the first true photographic close-ups: life-size, overfilling the frame, unnervingly close to the viewer. They are stunning pictures, created in unpromising conditions – the studio an old, cold hen house, the camera unwieldy, the chemicals dangerous and the glass plates easily cracked. Not to mention the reluctant sitters: infants bribed with sweets not to blink for minutes on end, maids commanded to pose wearing shifts and wings, visitors and celebrities cajoled and bullied to take part in Mrs C's new hobby.

She was 48. Her older husband was a colonial administrator, and her youngest child was off to Charterhouse when she was given a camera for Christmas. To begin with, everything failed. Then, thanks to "the docility and sweetness" of eight-year-old Annie Philpot, came a triumph. "This Photograph was taken by me at 1pm Friday Jan 29th, Printed, Toned, fixed and framed all by me & given as it is now by 8pm this same day" runs the grateful inscription.

Thus went the legend of Cameron's "first perfect success" within a month of starting out. In fact, she had been learning for a while, by composing shots, instructing photographers, borrowing plates, printing positives and compiling albums. A camera of her own was the last vital step. The brilliant career that followed lasted a mere decade, before the Camerons retired to their estates in Ceylon, where they died. The production rate was high, for Cameron was a professional artist who clung to the title of amateur in order to distance herself from commercial photographers. They retaliated by slating her technique.

The other legend, of the batty old bag, is more generally accurate. Cameron once accompanied a guest to the station, tea-cup in hand, stirring as she went. The table linen at her home on the Isle of Wight was streaked black from her mid-meal appearances straight from the darkroom, dripping prints in hand.

The results were both pioneering and spectacular. With bold, cropped framings in soft and sharp focus, their chiaroscuro is modernist, almost abstract. As with the familiar portrait of Virginia Woolf's mother, the artist's niece Julia, they are like publicity shots to die for – unsurprising in that Cameron's chosen themes are fame and beauty. Those of Mary Ryan, a real-life beggarmaid whom Cameron met on Putney Heath, actually led to a transformation, when a gentleman fell in love with, and married, the sitter.

Other striking subjects include a saturnine, cinematic Iago, solemn yet sentimental madonnas, the bearded patriarchs Carlyle and Tennyson, and – most interesting but least discussed – young prince Alamayou of Ethiopia and unnamed Sri Lankan villagers.

Both these books show how Cameron's aspiration "to ennoble Photography and secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty" was realised, almost in despite of such pretension. "From life" was the note proudly added to many works, compelling respect for the actuality behind the artifice.

Victoria Olsen's biographical account is deftly written and well-crafted, using all the latest research and unpublished letters. That by Colin Ford, curator of the new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, is more concise, differently informative, and contains full-page plates with almost the impact of the originals.

Both authors defend Cameron's storyline set-pieces, which have often been ridiculed for staginess: Sir Lancelot, Edward III and Queen Philippa in cardboard crowns, the Wise and Foolish Virgins all looking equally foolish. But they, too, are forerunners, like stills from silent movies, foreshadowing the whole feature-film genre, using real people and real props to create a naturalist illusion of imagined fantasy.

Jan Marsh's biography of D G Rossetti is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson