The Ruskins and the Grays

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33189, 31 March 1973, Page 10

The Ruskins and the Grays

The Ruskins And The Grays. By Mary Lutyens. John Murray. 258 pp. Appendices and Index. In two previously published books on the marriage of John Ruskin and Effie Gray. “Effie in Venice.” and “Millais and the Ruskins.” Mary Lutyens mainly used Effie Ruskins's letters to examine the unhappy relationship. In this, the third volume to be published on this subject, though the one which should come first chronogically, the letters used were in the main, written by John Ruskin and by his father John James Ruskin. Most of the letters used were previously unpublished and thev throw new and revealing light on this very controversial subject. Mary Lutyens covers in this book the relationships between the two families, the Ruskins and the Grays, in earlier generations and the early ' encounters between John and Effie. She examines perceptively the circumstance which preceded the wedding, the reactions of both sets of parents to the match and the strange first 18 months of the marriage up until the time when John and Effie left for Venice in October, 1859. The fluency with which this volume runs lies partly in the author’s careful selection and unobtrusive annotation of the letters, partly in the easy style in which she links or contrasts

the letters and their writers to form an accurate picture of the complicated, mixed and changing emotions of the main characters in this drama of over 100 years ago. John Ruskin, not merely rhe famous art critic but an adored, dominated only son; his father, selfmade, determined yet affectionate; Effie torn between her desires to help her family and to please her husband—the vividness with which these personalities show in these pages is the result of two factors; of the Ruskins’s own fluent and lively expression of emotion, and of Mary Lutyens’s ability to show their lives against the social and economic background of their time. The Gray’s financial difficulties and rhe Ruskins’s reactions to them clearly had an enormous influence upon the new husband and wife. The author’s emphasis on all the different factors involved gives this account of the marriage a depth and solidity and makes more understandable the unhappy outcome so often attributed solely to Ruskin’s sexual failure. The lengthy research and editing which must lie behind this volume are so unobtrusive that the letters really teil the writer’s story on their own. “The Times” wrote of an earlier volume of this trilogy, “Mary Lutyens’s books are a model of how private papers should oe used.” “The Ruskins and the Grays” will again justify that tribute.