ART / SNEAK PEEK : JULIA MARGARET CAMERON'S SNAPSHOTS OF THE SOUL.

Lost in melancholy thought, the elegant young woman slumps against a floral-patterned interior wall, wistfully clutching at her necklace.

In some prints, she's given an allegorical title: ``Sadness.'' In others, she's rightly identified as the actress Ellen Terry, leading lady of the London stage and future flirting partner of playwright George Bernard Shaw.

But when her image was captured, in 1864, the 16-year-old model was in the throes of a miserable marriage to a man old enough to be her grandpa. While its moody halftones are pure Victorian kitsch, the portrait conveys something timeless and dignified about quiet human suffering.

British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79) - whose work is being highlighted in shows this fall at the J. Paul Getty Museum and Scripps College in Claremont - never got the acclaim of more ``serious'' male colleagues.

Her vision was personal. Her perspective was heart-to-heart.

She dared to market her works aggressively, not seeing why she shouldn't cash

in on her talent.

And to some minds, that made her very dangerous, says Getty assistant curator and exhibition organizer Julian Cox.

``A lot of the male art reviewers really had a go at her, and some of the reviews are really quite misogynistic because that (photography) was something women weren't supposed to do. That was men's work.''

Often peeled or blurred at the edges, Cameron's photos were faulted for their less-than-seamless technique. She wasn't into shooting prestige subjects like new steam engines or dead Crimean War cavalry.

Her tastes ran instead toward Arthurian legends, New Testament parables and Shakespearean scenes, toward great male minds and anguished female souls.

Highly theatrical and dramatically lit, her pictures are frozen stage sets, still-life psychodramas in which she cast eminent friends like poet Alfred Tennyson; historian Thomas Carlyle; and scientist J.F.W. Herschel, the Dr. Who look-alike who boosted photography by discovering a powerful fixing agent, sodium hyposulfite.

In contrast to the stiff-backed, forbidding formal portraits then in vogue, hers suggest hidden desires and half-buried longings.

``I think a lot of her choice of subject matter had to do with emulating the standards of high art,'' Cox says. ``She really does choreograph these scenes. They're highly constructed because of the amount of time it takes to set up the scene and then the time it takes to make the exposure.''

To the self-taught artist, a mother of six, the camera wasn't a coldly objective tool for documenting reality. It was a new kind of paintbrush for creating vivid tone poems and reawakening ancient myths.

It also was a means for taming the cruder energies of the late Industrial Revolution. Like most reform-minded women of her class and era, Cameron sought to raise the things she cared about to a higher spiritual plane. By making pictures that could hang in any middle-class parlor, she helped bring photography out of the darkroom and into the family room.

``You could look at her body of work and her basis of operation as pushing her ideas from the domestic sphere into the public sphere,'' Cox says.

About 40 of Cameron's prints are displayed in the Getty's ``Julia Margaret Cameron: The Creative Process'' through Jan. 5. Some 60 prints, including 20 on loan from the Getty, are in the Scripps' ``Annals of My Glass House: Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron,'' until Dec. 5.

Located at 17985 Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, the Getty's regular hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission and parking are free, but advance parking reservations are required. For information, call [phone].

The Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery is between 11th and 12th streets on the Scripps College campus, about 30 miles from downtown L.A. off the San Bernardino Freeway (10). Hours are 1-5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Admission is free. For information, call [phone].

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Photo: In this portrait of actress Ellen Terry, Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron captured a sense of introspection and sadness.