Volume 47, Number 11 · June 29, 2000
The Devil & Mr. Ruskin
By John D. Rosenberg
John Ruskin: The Early Years
by Tim Hilton
Yale University Press, 301 pp., $17.95 (paper)
John Ruskin: The Later Years
by Tim Hilton
Yale University Press, 656 pp., $35.00
The most striking moment in the two volumes of Tim Hilton's massive, quirky, often moving biography of Ruskin occurs not on, but between, two of their nearly one thousand pages. Filling the whole of a marginless right-hand page, an 1851 daguerreotype shows the young Effie Ruskin in the third year of her never-consummated marriage to Ruskin, who was then thirty-two. Demure, shapely, finely dressed by her wealthy in-laws, she sits with head sharply cocked to the left, as if straining to read the facing page. She looks mildly miffed, as well she might, for the text describes the young Ruskins' visit to Robert and Elizabeth Browning, after which Elizabeth remarks in a letter to a friend, 'Pretty she is and exquisitely dressed—that struck me—but extraordinary beauty she has none at all.'
Review, 5644 words
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