As a follow-up to the post on John Ruskin and "The King of the Golden River," I ran across an article in The Scotsman newspaper on a movie coming out about Effie Gray, Ruskin's wife. The movie stars Dakota Fanning as Gray, and includes Emma Thompson, Robbie Coltrane, and Derek Jacobi.
Ruskin reportedly wrote "The King of the Golden River" for the then 12-year-old Gray. Seven years later, when he was nearly 30, he married her, but supposedly never consummated the marriage. She modeled for the Pre-Rafaelite painter John Everett Millais and the two fell in love. She had her marriage with Ruskin annulled and she and Millais married.
The existence of the movie shows, I suppose, that the lives of eminent Victorians can still fascinate movie-makers, if not necessarily movie audiences, a century and a half after the fact - at least, if those eminent Victorians have unusual personal lives!
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