Books: The Case of Poor J.R.

• Share

JOHN RUSKIN AND EFFIE GRAY (258 pp.) —Admiral Sir William James—Scribner ($3.50).

"You are a . . . mantrap . . . a pitfall ... a beautiful destruction . . . a wrecker on a rocky coast—luring vessels to their fate . . . a high glacier covered with fresh morning snow—which is heavenly to the eye . . . but beneath, there are winding clefts and dark places in its cold—cold ice —where men fall and rise not again. . . . My dearest girl . . . Oh that I were but with you. . . ."

It was not every young girl who could hope to receive such epistles from the passionate pen of Art Critic John Ruskin. Nor was there reason why an innocent Scots girl like Effie Gray should not be elated at being the chosen "Medusa" of a man who, although still in his 20s, was England's most admired art critic. So, in 1848, Effie married John Ruskin—and only in the next six years of misery woke up to the fact that his love letters had meant precisely what they said.

Beneath a Board. Most of the 633 letters about the Ruskin-Gray marriage were found in the cellar of Effie's old Perthshire home, others under a loose board in Ruskin's old study. They bring to light a dismal, pathological scandal which most Ruskin admirers will wish had stayed buried. But Britain's Admiral Sir William James, who is Effie's grandson by her second marriage (to Ruskin's famed friend, Painter Sir John Millais), believes that it is about time someone cleaned up poor Effie's tarnished reputation, by frankly publishing evidence which was once well-known to London society but has been firmly ignored or distorted by most Ruskin biographers.

Even while England was acclaiming Ruskin the critic, Ruskin the man was under the total domination of a doting, querulous father and a mother who flattered and fondled her son. No wonder that, on his wedding night, Ruskin coolly informed Effie that sexual intercourse was irreligious, that he hated children, and that in any case she was too young (20) to consummate her marriage and must wait five years.

Out of a Corner. Effie waited five years. During that time she accompanied Ruskin on the trips that produced his most brilliant works (The Stones of Venice, The Seven Lamps of Architecture). Between trips, she was obliged to spend more & more time at his parents' home, accept their every word as law. As the five years drew to a close, Ruskin, like a desperate, cornered animal, turned against his wife with malice and savagery. He had ascribed her nervousness to too much coffee and too much sightseeing, and had written blandly to her father that although he was "thoroughly puzzled about the whole affair," he feared that Effie's "restiveness" was due to "incipient insanity" which made her unfit to become a mother.

Effie ran away. The Ruskin affair became the talk of the town. There were gossips who fulminated against Ruskin as a lecherous Casanova and peril to all decent women, which he was not. The Commissary Court made no such mistake. After pirouetting through interminable "whereases" and "wherefores," the judges roundly declared the marriage null & void "by reason of [the said John Ruskin's] incurable impotency."