24 HerStoria magazine Summer 2011 www.herstoria.com

off. They yielded eventually, but they did not go to the wedding. The young couple (accompanied by his valet) drove to an inn at Blair Atholl - and then there was some sort of disaster. Ruskin told his new wife that he was not going to consummate the marriage yet because he disliked children and wished to spend the next few years taking her round Europe. Effie, who ‘had never been told the duties of married persons’, was baffled, but did not complain.

The real reason, as Effie would write six years later in extreme distress, was

that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening.

in the Highlands. Their wedding night would go down in history.

Ruskin had first known Effie as a little girl when she stayed with his parents on her way home from boarding school; her three younger sisters had all died of scarlet fever in the summer of 1841 and he had written an original fairy tale to cheer her up. This was The King of the Golden River, a classic much loved by generations of children. Afterwards they kept in touch and Effie would say that he had been ‘influencing my mind and overlooking my education for years’.

In 1847 the relationship became serious. But Ruskin’s parents, who lived with him and were extremely possessive, wanted a grand match for their brilliant son and did all they could to put him

Effie Gray married John Ruskin on 10 April 1848, the day of

the great London Chartist demonstration. She was nineteen, friendly, charming and very intelligent; he was twenty-nine and already celebrated for his ground-breaking book of art criticism, Modern Painters. They were married in the drawing-room of Bowerswell, her home in Perth, and then left for a honeymoon

Desperately Romantic? The scandal of Effie Ruskin

By Merryn Williams

Portrait of Effie Millais by John Everett Millais, oil on canvas, 1873 © Perth Museum and Art Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council, Scotland

25HerStoria magazine Summer 2011

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 cold at the same time.

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? The scandal of Effie Ruskin

Effie, Millais and their daughters, photographed in 1865 by Lewis Carroll.

John Ruskin, Self-portrait

26 HerStoria magazine Summer 2011 www.herstoria.com

declared that ‘Euphemia Chalmers Gray falsely called Ruskin’ was now ‘free from all Bond of Marriage’ because of Ruskin’s ‘incurable impotency’. This document was not published, but could be read at Doctors’ Commons (the London-based college of ecclesiastical lawyers) by anyone who wished.

There were no tabloid newspapers in those days - fortunately for Effie who felt emotionally shattered and only wanted ‘to be little known or heard of’. But the chattering classes in London and Perth soon knew all about the scandal. Most were sympathetic to her, but Thomas Carlyle was heard to say that ‘no woman has any right to complain of any treatment whatsoever, and should patiently endure all misery’. Ruskin simply put it all behind him and never willingly referred to his marriage again. Everyone waited to see what Effie and Millais would do next, but her family were desperate to protect her reputation and, although they wrote to each other, they did not meet for over a year. Millais completed Ruskin’s picture and then refused to have anything more to do with him. He and Effie were quietly married at Bowerswell (she was described on the certificate as a spinster) in July 1855.

Ruskin never married again, although he did have an agonising relationship with a deeply religious girl called Rose La Touche with whom he had ‘fallen in love’, he said, when she was ten. Effie was reluctantly drawn in when Rose’s mother begged for her help; she had

with his work, but he repulsed her. Yet he was anxious to keep on good terms with Millais who was still working very slowly on the great portrait of Ruskin and as unhappy as Effie.

After a wretched winter Effie told her middle-aged friend, the critic Elizabeth Eastlake, the truth . She felt that if Ruskin ‘had only been kind, I might have lived and died in my maiden state’, but now he was threatening violence and planning to go on holiday in the Alps, with his parents and without her. Lady Eastlake then told her what she had never suspected, that a church court could be asked to annul her marriage.

On 25th April 1854, soon after her sixth anniversary, Effie got on the train for Scotland without telling

Ruskin, who saw her off at King’s Cross, that she was not coming back. That same evening he received a citation and a parcel containing her keys, account book, wedding ring, and a letter for her mother-in-law, informing her for the first time that her son had ‘never made me his wife’. She and Ruskin never met again. A month later, she was examined by two gynaecologists and found to be a virgin. Soon afterwards, the ecclesiastical court of Surrey

Ruskin’s cruel words in May 1853 finally killed her affection for him, but it was almost impossible for a mid-Victorian couple to get divorced. Soon afterwards, attempting to keep up appearances, they went with Millais and his brother to the village of Brig o’ Turk, in the Trossachs, where Ruskin planned to teach the young man to paint wild nature. Millais was overwhelmed by the magnificent scenery and started a portrait, John Ruskin, in which a correctly dressed Victorian gentleman 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

John Millais, aged around twenty-five

Effie’s home at Bowerswell, Perth.

27HerStoria magazine Summer 2011

Lake District. Effie died one year later.Watching in the shadows was George

Eliot, who had chosen to share her life with G.H. Lewes, the estranged husband of another woman, in the same year that Effie ended her marriage to Ruskin. She was not able to mix in respectable circles, although she and Millais had met and each admired the other’s work. In her great novel Middlemarch (1872) Eliot told a story not unlike Effie’s: a naive young woman marries an eminent older scholar, but the marriage is short, unhappy and childless. He takes her to Italy and leaves her to her

to say that he was not a fit husband for anyone, let alone a vulnerable girl thirty years younger than himself. Ruskin, and some of his admirers, never forgave her.

Queen Victoria was also hostile to Effie and refused to receive her, which would have been usual for the wife of a distinguished man. This meant that Effie was excluded from certain grand parties. It was very difficult to explain to her children. When Millais was dying, in 1896, he particularly asked the Queen to grant an audience to his wife, which she finally did. Ruskin had lost his mind years before and was living as a recluse in the

John Everett Millais, The Blind Girl (1856) © Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

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. Plenty of people had written about it, but they were often inaccurate, sometimes prejudiced, and they did not tell the story from beginning to end.

One reason why the story has been distorted is that Effie herself hoped it might be forgotten. She and Millais were married for forty-one years and had eight children. He became the most popular and successful of Victorian painters and eventually President of the Royal Academy. They loved each other to the end but they were not always happy, because her health was fragile - she nearly died more than once in childbirth - and because she could never quite get away from the past. Ruskin remained very famous and influential. In 1865 he published a lecture in Sesame and Lilies about the role of women:

A woman .... ought to know whatever her husband is likely to know, but to know it in a different way .... a man ought to know any language or science he learns, thoroughly - while a woman ought to know the same language, or science, only so far as may enable her to sympathise in her husband’s pleasures, and in those of his best friends.

This was the kind of book which used to be handed out to Victorian girls as a Sunday school prize. A man, he went on, guards his wife from the roughness of the outside world:

within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, [she] need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offence

(My italics). Those who knew his history must have seen this as a coded attack on the wife who had run away.

28 HerStoria magazine Summer 2011 www.herstoria.com

only to be a wife, mother and muse.Gladstone, who knew them all, may

have the final word. He was a foe of divorce but his daughter remembered long afterwards that he had said

Should you ever hear anyone blame Millais, or his wife, or Mr Ruskin, remember there was no fault: there was misfortune, even tragedy: all three were perfectly blameless.

own devices. She meets a young and charming artist, with curly hair and a foreign name, to whom her husband has been kind. They fall in love but do not have an affair. In the end they come together, but people who never met her say that ‘she could not have been a “nice woman”, else she would not have married either the one or the other’.

As I pieced the story together, it seemed to me that Effie had not had justice. For two generations nobody, including her children, wanted to say much about the scandal. And when more facts became known some of Ruskin’s disciples, while conceding that he had been rather strange, thought she must have been unworthy of such a great man. Others said she had been a bad influence on Millais because he had had to paint too many pictures to support his family and because his reputation declined catastrophically in the twentieth century. Roy Strong in a 1967 article, ‘Down with Effie’, blamed her for everything that went wrong with his art. Yet the fact is that she was a most devoted wife who did all she could to help Millais. She modelled for some of his greatest paintings - The Order of Release, The Blind Girl, The Eve of St Agnes - and her sisters and her family home appear in two more, Autumn Leaves and The Vale of Rest. She was a highly intelligent woman but the circumstances of her life allowed her

Need to KnowMerryn Williams’ book, Effie: A Victorian Scandal – From Ruskin’s wife to Millais’s Muse is published by Book Guild (2010). www.bookguild.co.uk 01273 720900

You can view The Order of Release and other pictures by Millais at Tate Britain in London.

Effie’s daughter Alice Stuart-Wortley (1862-1936) was a musician and close friend of Edward Elgar. He called her ‘Windflower’ and she is thought to have inspired his Violin Concerto. Effie’s granddaughter Perrine Moncrieff (1893-1979) was the first acknowledged woman ornithologist in New Zealand and a founder of Abel Tasman National Park.