Effie

April 25, 2011
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 protégé, 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.