But Lee knows where everything is at every moment, just like she used to know in her studio, the clutter confounding to everyone except her. Spice jars teeter in uneven towers, pots in various states of filth cover the counter and fill the sink, containers of vinegar and oil stand open on the shelves. No one goes in here without her, and if they did, they could never find what they were looking for. Of all the rooms at Farley Farm, the kitchen is where Lee is most content. Each time she watches him leave, the hand that's clenched around her throat loosens a little. Now she thinks he welcomes the time apart from her, as she does from him. Roland stopped asking her to join him on his constitutionals years ago, after she told him that until he puts a sidewalk on the downs and lines it with café bars, she's not going to be wasting her time tromping through the hillsides. Lee's herb garden is just outside the kitchen and about as far as she ever chooses to walk. He has two of their houseguests with him, and stops to point out a mole's burrow that could break an ankle, or a cowpat that might be a little too much country for some visitors. Her husband, Roland, with his walking stick, wends his way along the bridle path.

Stone walls made long before she got here that divide up the landscape and keep the sheep where they belong, calmly chewing.

From the windows in Lee Miller's kitchen she sees hills in all directions. The downs have greened up from the past week's rain and rise into the sky like mossy breasts. Through it all, Lee must grapple with the question of whether it’s possible to stay true to herself while also fulfilling her artistic ambition–and what she will have to sacrifice to do so. Lee’s journey of self-discovery takes took her from the cabarets of bohemian Paris to the battlefields of war-torn Europe during WWII, from inventing radical new photography techniques to documenting the liberation of the concentration camps as one of the first female war correspondents. As they work together in the darkroom, their personal and professional lives become intimately entwined, changing the course of Lee’s life forever. Though he wants to use her only as a model, Lee convinces him to take her on as his assistant and teach her everything he knows. “I’d rather take a photograph than be one,” Lee Miller declares after she arrives in Paris in 1929, where she soon catches the eye of the famous Surrealist Man Ray.

“A startlingly modern love story and a mesmerizing portrait of a woman’s self-transformation from muse to artist.” –Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere One of the Best Books of the Year: Parade, Glamour, Real Simple, Refinery29, Yahoo! Lifestyle.

The age of light by whitney scharer