A love triangle which was played out in Perth and scandalised Victorian society is being retold in a new book and a forthcoming film.
The story of Effie Gray, wife of the 19th Century’s greatest art historian and critic, John Ruskin, their repressed relationship and her subsequent affair with Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir John Everett Millais still captures the public imagination.
Reflecting that enduring interest is Emma Thompson who has written and stars in a film which is due to be released next year telling the tale which began with their ill-fated marriage in Bowerswell House in Perth.
After six unhappy years of marriage the union was annulled on the grounds that Gray was still a virgin, leaving her free to be with Millais.
The film has an all-star cast including Dakota Fanning, Greg Wise, Emma Thompson, Julie Walters, Derek Jacobi, Robbie Coltrane, Tom Sturridge, James Fox and David Suchet.
A new book on the union, Marriage of Inconvenience, has also just been published. Author Robert Brownwell spent 12 years researching his book and it can lay claim to being the last word on the story.
He re-examines every pertinent document from diaries and personal letters, many printed in full for the first time, to contemporary legal papers and offers a new and carefully weighted interpretation of the background, developing drama and ultimate conclusion of one of the century’s most fascinating scandals.
“A great deal of the book is set in Scotland, and even more particularly in Perth since both Ruskin and his wife came from Perth families, on his side marked with tragedy, on hers with the shadow of bankruptcy from the effects of the speculative fever that apparently reigned in Perth at the time,” said Alexander Fyjis-Walker of publisher, Pallas Athene.
“They were married in a house that still stands and which saw its fairshare of drama, including his grandfather’s suicide.
“The disastrous wedding night was at Blair Atholl and the marriage came to its ultimate end in the Trossachs, but Effie returned repeatedly to her Perth family and indeed is buried in Kinnoull.”
The book asks whose interests were helped by turning an intensely private tragedy into a national scandal.
Books, plays, television series, an opera and films have all shown Effie taking her destiny in her own hands and breaking free of a repressed and repressive husband.
In Marriage of Inconvenience, Robert Brownwell sheds new light on the hitherto accepted story.
According to the publisher, the surprising truth that emerges is no less human, and no less revealing about the Victorians than the myths, and provides a compelling insight into what relationships, family and money really mean.