He may well have had tuberculosis, although his father ascribed his ailment to 'over Study' вЂ“ not impossible since, at the age of 12, he had written a 2,212-line poem about a family tour of the Lake District. Ruskin was an only child, doted on by his parents and afflicted by both his mother's intense religiosity and ill-health. Effie would stay with the Ruskins during school holidays and John wrote his fairytale The King of theВ Golden River for her. Both came from Perth families, and the Grays moved into the old Ruskin family home after John's father, a successful wine merchant, relocated to London for business. Ruskin and Effie had known each other since she was a child.

Brownell, though, has subjected the surviving letters to a forensic reading and has drawn conclusions that are at odds with the established story. Much of the correspondence between the parties was subsequently edited or destroyed by Effie's relatives to protect her reputation as the injured party. The truth about the wedding night and marriage can never be fully known,В but a new book, Marriage of Inconvenience by Robert Brownell, is about to revise perceptions of the whole sad episode. It may not rival Cleopatra's nose, but poor Effie has gone down as the possessor of the most famous genital coiffure in history. From this emerged the canard that Ruskin, used only to the smoothness of classical statues of the nude, was repulsed by the wedding-night revelation that EffieВ had pubic hair. Effie herself was the inadvertent source of the most famous of explanations: Ruskin, she said, 'had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening'. The reasons mooted range from his aversion to children, his religious scruples, a wish to preserve Effie's beauty and to keep her from exhaustion so they could go Alpine walking, to a revulsion with body odour and menstruation. Those 'certain circumstances' have been the cause of much salacious speculation. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it.' But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. ButВ what really snagged in the public consciousness was Ruskin's explanation of why he didn't fulfil his marital duties: 'It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive.

What reverberated then and now was that the reason given for ending the union was non-consummation. After six increasingly unhappy years, Effie fell inВ love with her husband's protege Millais and set about having the marriage annulled. In 1848 the 29-year-old Ruskin вЂ“ two volumes of the influential Modern Painters to his name and at work on The Seven Lamps of Architecture вЂ“ married Euphemia Gray, the beautiful 19-year-old daughter of family friends.

Effie gray