Effie Gray

Euphemia Chalmers Millais, Lady Millais (née Gray; 7 May 1828 – 23 December 1897) was a Scottish artists' model and the wife of Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. She had previously been married to the art critic John Ruskin, but she left him with the marriage never having been consummated; it was subsequently annulled. This famous Victorian "love triangle" has been dramatised in plays, films, and an opera. Early life Euphemia Chalmers Gray was born on 7 May 1828 in Perth, Perthshire, Scotland to lawyer and businessman George Gray (1798–1877) and Sophia Margaret (1808–1894), daughter of Andrew Jameson, Sheriff-substitute of Fife. She grew up at Bowerswell, an Italianate-style house near the foot of Kinnoull Hill. Though she was given the pet-name "Phemy" by her parents as a child, she started to be known as "Effie" by the time she was a teenager. Her sisters Sophie and Alice often modelled for John Everett Millais. Between 1842 and 1844 she attended Avonbank school run by the Misses Byerley near Stratford on Avon, Warwickshire, England, partly as her parents wanted her to lose her Scottish accent. She was an assiduous student at Avonbank winning prizes in every year but was taken out of school to be a support to her mother when her siblings died of scarlet fever. Relationship with John Ruskin John Ruskin wrote the fantasy story The King of the Golden River for Gray in 1841, when she was 12 and he was 21. Gray's family knew Ruskin's father and encouraged a match between the two when she had matured. After an initially unsteady courtship, she married Ruskin on 10 April 1848; she was 19 years old. During their honeymoon, they travelled to Venice, where Ruskin was doing research for his book The Stones of Venice. While in Perth, Scotland, they lived at Bowerswell, the Gray family home, and site of their wedding. It had, coincidentally, previously been the home of Ruskin's paternal grandparents. In 1817, Ruskin's mother, Margaret, during her engagement to Ruskin's father, had stayed at Bowerswell and was witness to three tragic deaths within its walls in quick succession (Ruskin's grandmother, grandfather, and newborn cousin). This caused her to develop a severe phobia of the place, keeping her from attending her son's wedding to Gray.