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Women with a Past

Factual: Life Stories

Factual: History

Series exploring the stories of women from the past.

Women with a Past: Series 2

Women with a Past: Series 2: Episode 2: Effie Gray

Effie Gray

Episode 2

Episode 2: Effie Gray

Series 2

BBC Radio Scotland - Women with a Past, Series 2, Effie Gray

An exploration of the life of Effie Gray and her escape from her marriage to John Ruskin.

Susan Morrison explores the life of Effie Gray, the wife of art critic and social reformer John Ruskin who later sought to wed Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais.

Euphemia (Effie) Chalmers Gray was the beautiful, vivacious wife of art critic and social reformer John Ruskin - but something was terribly terribly wrong in their marriage. For one thing, it was not consummated. Every Ruskin and Effie scholar has their theory about the downfall of the relationship - was he horrified by some aspect of the nude female body on his wedding night? Were his Evangelical 'helicopter-parents' to blame for ruining the match (especially his mum, Margaret Ruskin)? Could Ruskin have thought Effie had married him for money and felt repelled and unloved? There's no end of speculation but what we know is that Effie was driven to make a potentially reputation-ruining bolt for freedom to seek an annulment and to marry Ruskin's protégé - the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais.

The story has fascinated playwrights and novelists in the past, and now a forthcoming film starring Emma Thompson is due to open this year. We follow in Effie footsteps from the house where she was born, Bowerswell in Perth (a site of ancestral horror for the Ruskins - where his grandfather committed suicide) to Brig o'Turk where she fell in love with John Everett Millais, as he painted Ruskin's portrait in a beautiful but midge-infested river gorge. We speak to one of Effie's modern biographers Dr Suzanne Fagence Cooper in the V&A's prints and drawings room, while Ruskin scholar Dr Rachel Dickinson takes on the unenviable task of thinking about one of the worst chapters in her hero's life.

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