Six Victorian marriages, part 2: Effie Gray and John Ruskin

The Order of Release by John Everett Millais, 1853 (detail). Image source: Tate Britain

This is the second in a series of posts based on Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives (Knopf, 1984) and Diane Johnson's True History of the First Mrs. Meredith (NY Review Books, 2020).

Effie Gray and John Ruskin

With pre-marital chastity demanded absolutely of middle-class women (suggested but not required for men), the Victorian wedding night, a supercharged transition from innocence to experience, could hardly have been easy, may well have been a barbaric trial for at least one, and sometimes for both, of the newly married pair. [1]

John Ruskin, for example, found on his wedding night that his wife's body "was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it." [2] Gray herself wrote in a letter to her father, "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 10th April." [3] What caused Ruskin's reaction is not known; it has been speculated that he was shocked by her pubic hair or other differences between her body and the idealized nudes of art.

At the time of her marriage in 1848 Gray (her given name was Euphemia) was the pretty, vivacious 19-year-old daughter of Ruskin family friends who had fallen on hard financial times. He was a decade older, the son of a wealthy wine merchant, and already the author of the first two volumes of Modern Painters. Over the next five years he would publish The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, but he would never manage to work up the desire to have sex with his wife; they stayed apart from one another frequently. 

Effie Gray by Herbert Watkins. Albumen print, late 1850s. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London

Effie increasingly resented Ruskin's coldness and disapproval, which could become outright cruelty. On her twenty-fifth birthday in May 1853 he'd told her that he had no intention of ever consummating their marriage because he considered that she was mentally unstable and would be an unfit mother. As chief evidence of her depravity Ruskin cited Effie's interest in opera.

Both Ruskins admired the work of the artist John Everett Millais. Effie modelled for his painting The Order of Release, but after a sly comment from Ruskin's father began to wonder whether her husband was deliberately throwing her together with Millais. That suspicion may have been heightened in the summer of 1853 when Ruskin, Effie and Millais travelled to the Scottish hills and shared a small house while Millais painted Ruskin's portrait by a waterfall.

Portrait of John Ruskin by John Everett Millais, 1854. Image source: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

He also painted Effie near the same location. 

The Waterfall by John Everett Millais, 1853. Image source: Delaware Art Museum

As Rose writes, "in that tiny cottage the three of them lived together in disconcerting proximity. Millais could not help but see the neglect which Ruskin bestowed so lavishly upon his wife." [4] Millais learned (probably from Effie) that the marriage was and continued to be sexless, and he, too, began to wonder whether Ruskin was hoping that they would give him an excuse for separation or divorce—Effie's adultery.

John Everett Millais by Herbert Watkins. Albumen print, 1857. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London

If that was Ruskin's plan, it didn't work quite in the way he'd hoped. Millais and Effie did not begin an affair, but they did fall in love. And that gave Effie a powerful motivation to finally do something about her loveless marriage. On 25 April 1854 she left London on a planned visit to Scotland to stay with her parents; Ruskin was leaving on a tour of Switzerland with his parents in a few days. But Ruskin was unaware that Effie's parents had actually been in London for two weeks, that lawyers had been consulted and that Effie had submitted to what must have been a humiliating medical examination to prove her virginity. That night Ruskin was visited by her lawyers, who served him notice that she had filed suit in ecclesiastical court to have the marriage annulled. Ruskin wrote to his solicitor that he blamed the estrangement between them on her: 

Perhaps the principal cause of it—next to her resolute effort to detach me from my parents—was her always thinking that I ought to attend her, instead of herself attending me. [5]

Since Ruskin's failure to "attend" Effie was precisely what was at issue in her suit, his lawyer must have realized the bad effect this document might have if produced in court, and filed it away in his desk, where it remained undiscovered for seventy years.

Effie won the case; on 20 July she received notice that her marriage to Ruskin had been dissolved on the grounds of his "incurable impotency." [6] After waiting a year in order to curtail gossip she married Millais, and went on to have eight children with him (and be his frequent model). Ruskin never married again, although when he was approaching 50 he proposed to a former pupil, 18-year-old Rose La Touche (whom he had first met when she was 12), who ultimately turned him down.

In Parallel Lives Rose sees the Ruskin-Gray marriage as a union of incompatible sensibilities. Ruskin was primarily an observer, thinker and writer; Gray loved the opera and the theater and a varied social life. Rose is not trying to identify a villain or victim in their situation (although one may occur to us); instead she writes that "the novelistic imagination this material seems to me to demand is that of George Eliot, whose great theme was the egotism of perception and who assumed that all action rightly portrayed was a tragic—or comic—clash of understandings":

The plot from his point of view weirdly prefigures (by some twenty years) the story of Lydgate and Rosamund Vincy in Middlemarch: a high-minded man, dedicated to his work, is seduced by a pretty face and appealing manners and thinks he can annex the charming creature for life without seriously altering his pattern of living. . .If, however, we can sympathize with Ruskin as a Lydgate married to a Rosamund Vincy, the story of their marriage from Effie's point of view is uncannily similar to that of Dorothea Brooke's marriage to Casaubon—the story of an ardent, high-spirited woman who married an emotionally and sexually defective man. [7]

Next time: Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls and George Meredith
Last time: Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle

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1. Quoted in Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. Alfred Knopf, 1984, p. 57.
2. Quoted in Mary Lutyens, Millais and the Ruskins, Murray, 1967, p. 191.
3. Quoted in Vanessa Thorpe, "What was John Ruskin thinking on his unhappy wedding night?" The Observer 13 March 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/mar/14/john-ruskin-wedding-effie-gray
   
4. Quoted in Rose, p. 80.
   
5. Quoted in Rose, pp. 87-88.
6. Quoted in Rose, p. 91.
   
7. Rose, p. 70.