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Desperately Romantic? the Scandal of Effie Ruskin

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Desperately Romantic? the Scandal of Effie Ruskin Portrait of Effie Millais by John Everett Millais, oil on canvas, 1873 © Perth Museum and Art Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council, Scotland By Merryn Williams Desperately Romantic? The scandal of Effie Ruskin ffie Gray married in the Highlands. Their off. They yielded eventually, but they John Ruskin on 10 wedding night would did not go to the wedding. The young couple (accompanied by his valet) drove EApril 1848, the day of go down in history. to an inn at Blair Atholl - and then there the great London Chartist Ruskin had first known Effie as a little was some sort of disaster. Ruskin told demonstration. She was girl when she stayed with his parents his new wife that he was not going to on her way home from boarding school; consummate the marriage yet because nineteen, friendly, charming her three younger sisters had all died he disliked children and wished to and very intelligent; he was of scarlet fever in the summer of 1841 spend the next few years taking her and he had written an original fairy tale round Europe. Effie, who ‘had never twenty-nine and already to cheer her up. This was The King of the been told the duties of married persons’, celebrated for his ground- Golden River, a classic much loved by was baffled, but did not complain. breaking book of art generations of children. Afterwards they The real reason, as Effie would write kept in touch and Effie would say that six years later in extreme distress, was criticism, Modern Painters. he had been ‘influencing my mind and that he had imagined women overlooking my education for years’. They were married in the were quite different to what he In 1847 the relationship became saw I was, and that the reason drawing-room of Bowerswell, serious. But Ruskin’s parents, who lived he did not make me his Wife was with him and were extremely possessive, her home in Perth, and because he was disgusted with wanted a grand match for their brilliant then left for a honeymoon my person the first evening. son and did all they could to put him 24 HerStoria magazine Summer 2011 www.herstoria.com Yet all agree that she was a strikingly attractive young woman. Ruskin, though, was really interested only in teenage or pre-teenage girls, and would never, throughout his life, have an ordinary sexual relationship. The Encyclopaedia Britannica dismisses Effie as ‘essentially commonplace’. Certainly she was not a genius, like the two men she married, but she was highly educated for a Victorian woman, played the piano seriously and was fluent in three languages. Unlike Ruskin, she loved meeting people, and men soon began to hang around her. But she took her marriage and family responsibilities very seriously and refused to let them go too far. The couple spent long periods of time in Italy where Ruskin concentrated on writing his great book The Stones of Venice and, like Casaubon in Middlemarch, took little notice of his wife. He promised that when she was twenty-five they would consummate the marriage. Back in England, he got into the habit of taking breakfast with her, then spending the day at his parents’ house and coming home only to sleep. The older Mr and Mrs Ruskin made it clear that Effie was not the daughter-in-law they wanted. They were probably bitterly disappointed that, after five years of marriage, and in a pre-contraceptive age, there was still no baby. By this time Ruskin was very interested in the group of young artists who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The one who stood out was John Everett Millais, a former child prodigy now the same age as Desperately Romantic? Effie, Millais and their daughters, The scandal of Effie Ruskin photographed in 1865 by Lewis Carroll. Effie, sweet-natured, extremely handsome and the most promising British painter of his generation. He had been going through a bad time lately because his and his friends’ work had been savagely attacked. Ruskin wrote to the Times defending them, and this began a friendship which culminated in one of the great Victorian scandals. It all started quite innocently. Millais asked Ruskin to allow his wife to pose for his painting The Order of Release, in which the central figure is a heroic Highland woman who has freed her prisoner-of-war husband from jail. Millais agreed; he hardly cared what Effie did, so long as he could get on with his work. Although a masterpiece, the picture caused comment because respectable women did not usually pose for a narrative painting. Soon after it had been exhibited at the Royal Academy, Effie turned twenty-five. She reminded her husband of his promise and asked if they could now start a normal marriage and have a family; Ruskin refused. He told her that he had been repelled by her ‘person’ from the first night and, besides, ‘if I was not very wicked I was at least insane and the responsibility that I might have children was too great’. She had probably suspected for a while that her husband was an unusual man – I don’t think, poor creature, he knows anything about human creatures .... he is so gifted otherwise and so John Ruskin, Self-portrait cold at the same time. HerStoria magazine Summer 2011 25 with his work, but he declared that ‘Euphemia Chalmers repulsed her. Yet he was Gray falsely called Ruskin’ was now anxious to keep on good ‘free from all Bond of Marriage’ because terms with Millais who was of Ruskin’s ‘incurable impotency’. This still working very slowly on document was not published, but could the great portrait of Ruskin be read at Doctors’ Commons (the and as unhappy as Effie. London-based college of ecclesiastical After a wretched winter lawyers) by anyone who wished. Effie told her middle-aged There were no tabloid newspapers friend, the critic Elizabeth in those days - fortunately for Effie who Eastlake, the truth . She felt felt emotionally shattered and only that if Ruskin ‘had only been wanted ‘to be little known or heard of’. kind, I might have lived and But the chattering classes in London died in my maiden state’, and Perth soon knew all about the but now he was threatening scandal. Most were sympathetic to violence and planning her, but Thomas Carlyle was heard to to go on holiday in the say that ‘no woman has any right to Alps, with his parents and complain of any treatment whatsoever, without her. Lady Eastlake and should patiently endure all misery’. then told her what she had Ruskin simply put it all behind him never suspected, that a and never willingly referred to his church court could be asked marriage again. Everyone waited to to annul her marriage. see what Effie and Millais would do On 25th April 1854, soon next, but her family were desperate to John Millais, aged around twenty-five after her sixth anniversary, protect her reputation and, although Effie got on the train for they wrote to each other, they did not Ruskin’s cruel words in May 1853 Scotland without telling meet for over a year. Millais completed finally killed her affection for him, but Ruskin, who saw her off at King’s Cross, Ruskin’s picture and then refused to it was almost impossible for a mid- that she was not coming back. That have anything more to do with him. Victorian couple to get divorced. Soon same evening he received a citation and He and Effie were quietly married at afterwards, attempting to keep up a parcel containing her keys, account Bowerswell (she was described on the appearances, they went with Millais and book, wedding ring, and a letter for certificate as a spinster) in July 1855. his brother to the village of Brig o’ Turk, her mother-in-law, informing her for Ruskin never married again, although in the Trossachs, where Ruskin planned the first time that her son had ‘never he did have an agonising relationship to teach the young man to paint wild made me his wife’. She and Ruskin with a deeply religious girl called Rose nature. Millais was overwhelmed by never met again. A month later, she was La Touche with whom he had ‘fallen in the magnificent scenery and started examined by two gynaecologists and love’, he said, when she was ten. Effie a portrait, John Ruskin, in which a found to be a virgin. Soon afterwards, was reluctantly drawn in when Rose’s correctly dressed Victorian gentleman the ecclesiastical court of Surrey mother begged for her help; she had stands on a rock in front of a raging torrent. Around the same time he became aware that something was very wrong between Ruskin and his wife. Millais and Ruskin were both idealistic young people. Millais felt that he was ‘absolutely .... compelled in common courtesy’ to talk to Effie, since her husband was ignoring her, and they went for long walks in the mountains together thinking that they could remain simply friends. Of course within a few weeks they fell in love. It seemed hopeless; both thought it would be wrong to have an affair and Effie also feared that Millais’ career would be harmed by any scandal. They were utterly miserable and parted at the end of 1853, expecting never to meet again. By the time the Ruskins returned to London they were hardly on speaking terms at all. She offered to help him Effie’s home at Bowerswell, Perth. 26 HerStoria magazine Summer 2011 www.herstoria.com When I saw the great Millais exhibition at Tate Britain, in 2007, I thought that there must be an interesting book about the scandal and Effie’s later life - but, to my surprise, no such book existed.
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