Effie
The Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, John Ruskin and John Everett Millais
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Effie Gray, a beautiful and intelligent young socialite, rattled the foundations of England's Victorian age. Married at nineteen to John Ruskin, the leading art critic of the time, she found herself trapped in a loveless, unconsummated union after Ruskin rejected her on their wedding night. On a trip to Scotland she met John Everett Millais, Ruskin's protégé, and fell passionately in love with him. In a daring act, Effie left Ruskin, had their marriage annulled and entered into a long, happy marriage with Millais. Suzanne Fagence Cooper has gained exclusive access to Effie's previously unseen letters and diaries to tell the complete story of this scandalous love triangle. In Cooper's hands, this passionate love story also becomes an important new look at the work of both Ruskin and Millais with Effie emerging as a key figure in their artistic development. Effie is a heartbreakingly beautiful book about three lives passionately entwined with some of the greatest paintings of the pre-Raphaelite period.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1854, six years after marrying the famed art critic Ruskin, Scottish-born Effie Gray was still a virgin and the 25-year-old braved gossip and social ostracism by procuring an annulment. She later married Ruskin's prot g , the pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. Effie inspired other unhappily married women while mesmerizing art followers as a muse and model in Millais's popular paintings. But her early traumas left their mark on her distant relationship with her own daughters. Despite Cooper's access to substantial family records, which allow her to offer detailed recreations of Effie's fraught upper-class family life, the author admits to gaps in our knowledge of Effie's life, which she fills in by speculating, for instance, that Ruskin's physical disgust with Effie was due to her menstruating on their wedding night. Overall, Cooper illuminates an atmosphere of passionate artistic innovation and literary appreciation, and a high-profile romantic triangle offers an intriguing look into the peculiar interaction between Effie's two husbands in the name of art, and a young woman's remarkable refusal to bow to relentless class and marital subjugation. 8 pages of color photos, 8 pages of b&w photos.
