Many of her images of young women obscure their individuality and represent their identity as multifaceted and changeable by showing them "in pairs, or reflected in a mirror... frequently expressive of a deep ambiguity and anxiety." Janet Malcolm again notes Cameron's attention to the hair of her subjects, writing that "Like the little girls whose hair was mussed to rid it of its prim nursery look, the bigger girls were made to undo their buns and chignons so that their hair would poetically stream or flow or twist around their faces". Children — her own children, those of relatives, and young locals — were often models for Cameron. Children were popular subjects in the Victorian era and Cameron kept with the prevailing notion of them as innocent, kind, and noble. She regularly depicted them as angels or as children from Bible stories. The children in her images were not always cooperative, and her attempts to cast them as allegorical figures were often frustrated by the children's boredom, indignation, distraction — moods which are often evidenced in her images. Cameron may have found these illustrative group portraits more challenging than her other images. With more people in the image, the chances were greater that someone would move during the long exposures, so more light was needed to shorten the exposure time and arrest the motion. More sitters also meant a greater depth of field was necessary to put everyone in focus, further complicating the compositions. Cameron's narrative portraits of women were influenced by tableaux vivants and amateur theatre. The women in her images are typically depicted in the idealised Victorian roles of mother and wife. Cameron made over 50 images representing the Madonna, often played by her household servant Mary Hillier. These images present "an ideal of femininity that combines wholesomeness with qualities of sensuality and vulnerability". She represented the Virgin Mary in various scenes from the Bible, such as the Annunciation and the Salutation, but also created a number of images illustrating more obscure religious figures. Cameron took literature as inspiration for her illustrative photographs, representing characters from Shakespeare, Elizabethan poems, novels, plays, and the work of her contemporaries: Alfred Tennyson, Henry Taylor, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, and George Eliot. In 1874, Alfred Tennyson asked Cameron to create illustrations for a new edition of his "Idylls of the King", a popular series of poems about Arthurian legends. This series of images, influenced in part by Watts, was her last large-scale project and is considered the peak of her illustrative work.