Mirella Voss

The Glass Lantern Caravan's lanternist: she works the projection and tells the story over it, one week before a titled audience and the next in a market yard.

The Glass Lantern Caravan sells portraits, lantern recitations and musical evenings that may begin in a market hall and end in a private house. Mirella Voss is its lanternist. She paints half her own slides, works the lamp herself and tells the story over the pictures, and the evenings she leads are the ones the caravan is asked back for.

Like every company on the road, the caravan carries gossip as readily as song. Hers travels best, because she tells it as a story and lets the audience decide whether it happened. She buys her lenses from Milo Crow in Cambridge when the caravan passes that way, and copies his rigs when it does not.

In person

Untidy blonde hair, often braided or tied up in a scarf, a quick, amused face, and practical, colourful clothes cut for work rather than show: a waistcoat, breeches and boots under a patched coat.