Effie Gray

Effie Gray had her marriage to John Ruskin annulled for non-consummation after six years and married the painter who had used her as a model, which Victorian society did not forgive. She was a Scottish lawyer's daughter from Perth; Ruskin had written The King of the Golden River for her as a child and married her in 1848 when she was twenty. The marriage was never consummated, for reasons that have been argued about ever since and that the surviving letters do not settle. In 1853 the three of them - Ruskin, Effie and John Everett Millais - spent a summer at Glenfinlas in Scotland where Millais painted Ruskin standing on the rocks and fell in love with his wife. Effie left in 1854, returned her wedding ring, and brought a suit of nullity; she was medically examined to establish virginity, the decree was granted, and she married Millais the following year. They had eight children. Queen Victoria refused to receive her at court until 1901, after both husbands were dead, and she was excluded from society for forty years while Ruskin was not. Millais painted her repeatedly afterwards, and the Glenfinlas portrait of Ruskin was finished after she had left him, with the sitter and the painter barely speaking. She ran his household and much of his business for forty years and is credited with pushing him towards the lucrative portraiture his early admirers disliked. Ruskin never publicly discussed the annulment and his own account survives only in letters to his lawyers. She died a few months before Millais. The case has been retold in plays, an opera and two films, not always accurately.

• Lived: 1828 CE – 1897 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: other