Word: ruskinism
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Perhaps the most bizarre episode of all, though, concerns Ruskin's equivocal six-year marriage to a pretty Scottish lass named Erne Gray. It began in 1848 with mutual vows of temporary chastity; she was barely 20 and ailing, he wanted to travel before being burdened with children. It ended in 1854 with ferocious bitterness and an annulment that left Erne-still a virgin at 26-free to marry Ruskin's protege, Painter John Everett Millais...
Excuses, Excuses. Modern biographers have so grossly exploited the unseemly side of Victorian life that Millais and the Ruskins might be expected to emerge as just one more post-Freudian snigger at the sexual vagaries of yesteryear. In a sense, such treatment would be warranted. Ruskin did, after all, get through six years of marriage without bedding his wife. He later asserted that he had come to feel that Effie was unfit to be a mother...
...letters to her mother, British Biographer Mary Lutyens goes beyond mere sex, or the lack of it, to the daily arena of a marriage gone irretrievably bad. She examines relentlessly the small social grievances, the resentful pinprick rivalries that gradually engulf and demean everyone concerned. In the orgiastic 1960s, Ruskin's sexual abstinence would be regarded for Effie as a fate only slightly better than death. Effie lived in an age inclined to view "all that" more as a duty than a cheerful privilege, however, and she knew little of sex when she married...
...short, if sex had been the entire issue, Effie might have forgiven Ruskin his glaring sin of omission and settled down as just another glum Victorian helpmeet. But Ruskin, though a recognized genius and cultural lion, hated to go to parties (which Effie loved), could not bear to be disturbed at his work (Effie seemed to regard interruption as a woman's prerogative), and always said "I" instead of "we" when talking of their plans for anything. Worse, he plainly preferred his parents' company to her own. "All their conversation," she wrote, acidly describing an evening with...
...privately, seems to have set about trying to get rid of the other. The question was, how? Divorce was impossible except on the ground of adultery, a legal procedure regarded as unthinkably damaging socially. A dreadful, though never mutually acknowledged, duel began. As Effie came to see it, Ruskin was bent on forcing her to leave him not merely by his neglect but by throwing her at various gentlemen friends, including Millais, hoping to involve her in what she quaintly referred to as a "scrape." She, on her part, meticulously maintained a spotless reputation. For years she had not dared...