BY THE SAME AUTHOR Criticism and biography Preface to Hardy Women in the English Novel, 1800-1900 Margaret Oliphant: A Critical Biography Six Women Novelists Wilfred Owen Poetry The Sun’s Yellow Eye The Latin Master’s Story The First Wife’s Tale Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca (translated) In the Spirit of Wilfred Owen (edited) The Georgians, 1901-30 (edited) Letter to my Rival Fiction Clare and Effie The Chalet Girls Grow Up Jane Austen’s The Watsons (completed). EFFIE: A VICTORIAN SCANDAL ‘A woman, let her be as good as she may, has got to put up with the life her husband makes for her.’ George Eliot, Middlemarch, Chapter 25 Merryn Williams Plas Gwyn Books For David Hemp Richard and Rosalind Evans Plas Gwyn Books c/o 19 The Paddox Oxford OX2 7PN copyright © Merryn Williams 2010 Second Edition 2015 Contents INTRODUCTION PART ONE: EFFIE GRAY 1 The Fair Maid of Perth 2 The Graduate of Oxford PART TWO: EFFIE RUSKIN 3 The Virgin Wife 4 The Stones of Venice 5 The Marvellous Boy 6 Portrait of John Ruskin 7 The Eve of St Agnes PART THREE: EFFIE GRAY FALSELY CALLED RUSKIN 8 The Order of Release PART FOUR: EFFIE MILLAIS 9 The Young Mother 10 The Sick Rose 11 Modern Painters 12 The Old Man of Coniston Aftermath: The Vale of Rest APPENDIX: Middlemarch and the Ruskin marriage Notes Bibliography Acknowledgements INTRODUCTION Effie Gray was the wife of two distinguished Victorians, John Ruskin and John Everett Millais, in an age when divorce was almost impossible. The annulment of her first marriage was one of the great scandals of the 1850s and would follow all three of them around until the last of them died. Even then, although families and disciples tried to hush it up, it was not forgotten. The story was told again and again, in a mutilated form, and if one of the three was blamed it was usually her. The letters which they all wrote during the crisis remained unpublished for another century. Millais preferred to express his feelings in paint, and some of his greatest works are images of Effie and Ruskin. What was unusual was not that the first marriage went sour but that Effie was able to break away legally and reinvent herself as Mrs Millais. Of course, there was a price to pay. Her reputation would always be slightly spotted; Queen Victoria refused to receive her and many people thought - still think - that she behaved badly. There were no tabloid newspapers in those days but, then as now, there was a great deal of malice, fault-finding and unwholesome interest in ‘celebrities’. Then, Thomas Carlyle said that no woman had a right to complain about her husband’s behaviour; now, critics say that Effie was a commonplace woman who dragged down two great men. The real Effie Gray was a brave, gifted and essentially decent young woman who wanted with all her heart to be respectable. But she was trapped in a situation which did no good to anyone, and in extremity, people sometimes find their way around the rules. Few other careers were open to her, so she became what is called a Muse. Her face, slightly changed, looks past the crowds in Tate Britain from The Order of Release; her influence lurks behind Ruskin’s King of the Golden River and ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, which describes his ideal wife. George Eliot, who also had a scandal in her life, brooded over her story and reinterpreted it in Middlemarch. Gladstone believed that ‘all three were perfectly blameless’. I do not disguise my sympathy for Effie or my liking for Millais, but this book is not an attack on Ruskin. He was a man of great nobility who found relationships difficult, especially with women, and who was not always sane. The valuable part of his work is still very relevant in the twenty-first century, but, as Effie said, that has nothing to do with domestic life. - PART ONE: EFFIE GRAY 1 The Fair Maid of Perth 1828-4 And how should Dorothea not marry? - a girl so handsome and with such prospects? Middlemarch, Chapter 1 On a day in late October, 1817, John Thomas Ruskin, the tenant of Bowerswell Villa in Perth, suddenly appeared in front of his niece Margaret with a terrible 1 gash in his throat. She immediately stopped the bleeding with a towel, called a doctor and helped sew up the edges of the wound. Everything possible was done, but a few days later, he died. Very soon afterwards, Margaret married the old man’s son, as she had wanted to do for years, and moved to London. For the rest of her long life she hated Perth and Scotland and refused to set foot inside that house. If his grandfather had not committed suicide, John Ruskin would probably not have been born and the history of Victorian thought would have been different. That tragedy would reverberate down the generations and affect several other lives. Ten years later, when Mr George Gray, Writer to the Signet, was looking for a place to bring his new wife, his eye fell on the same house, Bowerswell (pronounced Bower’s Well). Built in 1800, it stood a short way up the steep lane which runs up Kinnoull Hill, surrounded by tall trees and with an ancient well in the grounds. He thought it needed some improvements, perhaps the whole house ought to be 2 pulled down and rebuilt, but the situation was superb. The garden had enough space for a long walk, yew and holly hedges, a bowling green. Behind it, the hill rose 729 feet to give wonderful views of the parks and spires of Perth, the mighty River Tay and the higher hills to the north. Generations of his family would admire ‘the rolling Strath of Tay, the lavishly tinted and ever-changing woods, the distant hills, now purple with heather, now white with ice and snow, the majestic river’ (1). Mr Gray knew what the former tenant had done, but he was not superstitious. George Gray and Sophia Jameson were married and moved into Bowerswell on 18th June 1827. He was twenty-nine; she was nineteen and the daughter of Andrew Jameson, Sheriff Substitute of Fife. A photograph taken some thirty years later shows a tall balding man and a woman who looks surprisingly good after having given birth to fifteen children. Those who knew them thought that Mrs Gray was ‘a sweet, quiet and sensible person, an excellent manager without bustle or conceit’; her grandson remembered her as bright and cheerful. Mr Gray was said to be 3 ‘thoroughly good-natured, open and hospitable with excellent temper and warm-heartedness, he has also shown that he possesses no small share of common sense and judgement in the way he has improved his fortune and brought himself and family into the best society his neighbourhood affords’ (2). A Writer to the Signet is a senior Scottish lawyer. George Gray is described in official documents sometimes as a solicitor, sometimes as a banker. He did not stick to the legal profession but dabbled in commerce, and it would get him into trouble. On 7th May 1828 the couple’s first child, Euphemia Chalmers Gray, was born in the bedroom where old Ruskin had died. Her parents called her Phemy, but after she left home she was usually known as Effie. In the same year Sir Walter Scott published a novel called The Fair Maid of Perth and this name stuck to her too. The town, which was the ancient capital of Scotland, had a population of about 20,000. Tall ships still sailed upriver to the port of Perth, although in Effie’s lifetime it would lose most of its trade to 4 Dundee. Weaving, dyeing, whisky and salmon-farming were the chief industries. The west bank of the Tay was lined with grand Georgian buildings whose gardens ran down to the waterfront (the wynds and vennels where the workers lived were less visible). Seagulls swooped around the cobbled streets and swans nested on the willow-covered islands. Bowerswell is on the quieter east bank, about fifteen minutes’ walk downhill and across the wide old bridge to the centre of town. Perth was, and is, a friendly place; it was also small enough for people to know every detail of their neighbours’ lives. The Grays were a cultured, affluent, good-natured family, highly respected in their circle and regular attendees at Kinnoul parish church. Effie’s probable future seemed to be a quiet, small-town life and marriage to a fellow Scot; however, she was less than two weeks old when she got involved with the Ruskins. The John Ruskin who had killed himself had a daughter, Jessie Richardson, a widow with four children who still lived in the riverside suburb of 5 Bridgend. Her brother, John James Ruskin, was a sherry merchant in London who sometimes visited her, bringing his wife and son. In the same month of May 1828 Jessie died and her very distressed brother was left to wind up her affairs. He took her daughter, Mary, into his home and started the three sons in careers. Mr Gray was an unofficial guardian to these boys and he and John James exchanged regular letters about them. But living so far apart (there was no railway to Perth then), the two families seldom met. Effie grew into a pretty, fair-haired and highly intelligent little girl. Her brother George was born seventeen months later; he and she would be friends all their lives.