The Life of a Muse Is No Life at All
Sophy by Alysandra Dutton
1882
A year before she dies, Sophy has a visitor in the hospital. It is the renowned painter John Millais, of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He brings everything: paint, palettes, linseed oil, stretched canvas already prepped a soft brown, a stand, a jar full of brushes, a jar full of stuff to clean the brushes, palette knives, a change of clothes. Then he offers her a chagrined smile and leaves, these things in a heap, only to come back with more things: clothes for her to wear, a drop cloth for her floor, a crate for her to rest her arm on, should she choose to sit.
Sophy chooses to stand.
The critics appear as he paints. It has been a long time since Sophy last saw them. The first one hovers at John’s shoulder and squints at Sophy. “So waifish,” he says.
“Absolutely none of the boldness that made her famous,” the second critic adds, materializing behind the first.
“But that makes this rendition all the more intimate and sad,” the third critic says, having appeared in a corner. “And who better to render the heartbroken tragedy of her life than her brother-in-law?”
The first critic nods. “They always had a connection.”
“Look directly at me, Sophy,” John instructs. “As you did twenty-five years ago.”
He thinks he can hide the emaciation within her clothes, the thinness of her wrists in a dynamic pose. Her face is another story; her nose has suffered the loss of fat, its imperfections more pronounced. At least her lips and chin are the same, as full, as bold, as set in gorgeous disapproval as they were when she was a child. He paints into the night, pausing only to massage cramps out of his wrist.
1873
The asylum is called Manor Farm House. During the first of Sophy’s admissions, she finds it a tolerable place to live; she plays piano and reads and sometimes takes visitors. James Caird, a well-to-do from her hometown in Perth, Scotland, comes three times. On the third, he asks her to marry him.
“You look splendid,” he says.
She does not. Her thinness has not read delicate since she was a child; now, she is emaciated, and her dress a decade out of fashion.
He never understood her fame, James tells her. He’s met a few of the pre-Raphaelites and found them to be jumped-up, sex-crazed, pompous windbags. James Caird prefers science. He wants to fund an expedition to Antarctica. He thinks Sophy’s family cares too much about what people think of their daughters, and that all Sophy needs to cure her hysteria is fresh air and sunshine.
“And about your family,” James says. “You need solitude to recover your resilience. Once we are married, I don’t want you seeing them so much, especially that John.”
With this addendum, Sophy accepts on the spot.
Before their wedding, her sister Effie stands behind her at the vanity and pins Sophy’s hair. “Do you remember when you came to stay with me in London? I would tell Ruskin that I had to brush your hair just to have an excuse to get away from him.” Effie picks up limp sections of Sophy’s hair from her shoulders and lets them fall. “I was so jealous of it. But look how thin it is now.”
The first critic is there. He mutters to itself. “The hair,” he says. “Surely the crowning of Sophy’s sensuousness was her hair unbound. Millais’ portraits of Sophy’s other sisters always had their hair pinned and netted.”
Effie puts their faces together in the mirror. Her hair has begun to gray, her cheeks begun to line. Sophy, though a decade younger, has long since gone this way. Her hair is brittle and comes out in pieces.
“You can stay with me and John instead,” Effie says. “You must know that after all this time, we forgive you. No one even talks about it anymore. You needn’t be afraid to come back to society.”
The wedding is sedate and quiet, accompanied by hushed voices of people scared that a sudden sound might shatter the careful peace between Sophy’s parents, weeping with disapproval, and the bride, whose face hurts from smiling. When the ceremony is finished, she boards a sleeper train with her husband, James Caird. Only that night, in the cabin, does her mistake become obvious: as he enters her, James Caird says into her ear, “I saw ‘Portrait of a Young Lady‘ in a gallery ten years ago, and wanted you every day since.”
The three critics, crowded at the window of the compartment, smirk at this. The second points out, “A man of science is nearly always a man of art. You cannot separate the two.” But it is too late for Sophy to do anything else but endure, and bleed a little on the sheets, as she loses a long speculated-over virginity.
1869
The eve of her that first institutionalizing, Sophy plays the family piano in Bowerswell House for hours. Her mother cries. “It’s so beautiful,” she says to Sophy’s father. “Why can’t she speak to us like she speaks to those keys?”
Sophy is a woman of twenty-six, but still thin like a girl, with the same jutting collarbone and delicate wrists as when she sat for her most famous portrait. In the morning, John Millais arrives to escort her to the Manor Farm House. It is the least he can do, he assures her parents. He takes Sophy’s hand like it is as fragile as porcelain.
“Dr. Tuke is very good,” he says. “He understands passionate people like you.”
They take the train all the way to Chiswick. Effie appears briefly, to kiss her sister and husband on the cheeks, before rushing off to a social engagement. She promises Sophy will feel so much better, so very soon. The Manor’s garden boasts a tangle of roses lining a neat, brick walkway. But when Sophy arrives, all the rosebuds are shorn to nubs, thick and bare and gray, waiting for warm weather to return.
Dr. Tuke escorts Sophy to his office after the intake is over. The patient’s chair is close to the window, where she can look down at the garden. The critics follow her, but at a distance. She has gotten less interesting, lately.
‘Do you think your hysteria is down to your tendency to seduce men with wives?’ Dr. Tuke asks.
“Do you think your hysteria is down to your tendency to seduce men with wives?” Dr. Tuke asks. He pulls at his collar. “Is your anorexia nervosa so that you can maintain your sex appeal?”
It was a marvel how a rosebush could be cut nearly down to its roots, down to a stubble of branches, and still flourish in the next bloom.
“Were you the cause of the demise of your sister’s first marriage?”
On the pathway below, John Millais is leaving. Sophy watches him as he stoops to touch one of the pruned-off bushes, inspecting it like it might tell him whether it will grow taller, bloom more beautifully, than the rest. Dr. Tuke cranes his neck to see the path and harumphs into his mustache.
“It’s my advice you get married,” he says. “Perhaps in absenting the rumors about your relationship to your brother-in-law, you’ll feel better.”
1859
Sophy is sixteen, and at a party. Her portrait, which her family has rejected, has been sold to John’s friend George Price Boyce. She is invited to the unveiling. Effie and John are there; Sophy hasn’t seen them for three years. Boyce’s lover, Fanny Cornforth, is also present, her neckline shoved sloppily to one shoulder. Her portrait, sized the same, is displayed beside Sophy’s.
“Aren’t we gorgeous?” she asks by way of introduction, and kisses Sophy’s cheek.
Fanny’s portrait is called “Bocca Baciata”—the mouth that has been kissed. Next to this rendering—Fanny’s parted lips, apple-cheeks, flushed skin—and in the matching gold frames Boyce has procured, Sophy’s portrait is all the more suggestive.
“You’re so quiet,” Fanny says, her arm snuck around Sophy’s girlish waist. “Isn’t she so quiet?”
Sophy-at-thirteen looks down on Sophy-at-the-party from the wall.
The third critic appraises her. “She demonstrated so much erotic potential, so young.”
“Contextualized through display next to Boyce’s famously promiscuous mistress, you can’t help but imagine that this is how Millais intended her image be received all along,” the second critic says. “Passionately.”
“Don’t you look lovely, my muse?” Boyce asks, kissing Sophy’s hand.
“I wish your parents had kept it,” Millais says, kissing Sophy’s other hand.
“I think you look terrible,” Effie says, and everyone, even the critics, laugh from their bellies. In every room Sophy enters the artists whisper and circle her, the reclusive muse of John Millais. Bursts of merriment echo into the hallway. She opens a door to another receiving room and finds Fanny kissing George Price Boyce, open-mouthed. The critics follow and crowd her wherever she goes.
“One imagines she was an object of great lust in her time,” the first one says.
“Even before ‘Portrait of a Young Lady,’ she exuded sexual charisma,” the second says.
They jog to keep up with her. The third critic is waiting behind the door when Sophy flings it wide.
“Given Millais and Sophy’s obvious closeness,” he says, “one wonders about the timing of Sophy’s trip to London, and Effie’s subsequent failed marriage to John Ruskin.”
“Sensuous!” the first shouts down the street at Sophy.
“Coy!” the second shouts as Sophy buys a ticket for the train.
“Notorious!” the third shouts as her parents’ manservant meets Sophy at the Perth station.
The critics press their heads together at her childhood door and go on: what undeniable attraction she must have had for Millais to level such a gaze at him, what suggestive maturity she displayed by lifting her chin so. What about the rumors that Effie Gray banned them from seeing each other? How tragic, for John, to have two such noted loves of his life, and to only be allowed to choose one.
In the morning Sophy’s parents let themselves into her room to find the mirror, the pearl-inlaid brush, the canopy, and the vanity all cracked, broken, slashed, and dented. The critics chatter on, even when Sophy holds a pillow over her head and screams.
1857
John Millais has finally finished “Portrait of a Young Lady.” Before he reveals it to the world, he unveils it for Sophy’s family. The critics gasp three identical gasps, and then there is silence. Sophy’s mother begins to weep. Sophy’s little sister Alice oohs and aahs. Sophy’s father jumps to his feet, shouting, “What’s the meaning of this?!” Effie sits in brooding silence, her hand grips Sophy’s so tightly, white spots appear on Sophy’s skin.
“Sophy is an incredible muse,” John says, admiring the portrait. “Her likeness stirs great emotion in all of us.”
“It’s pretty,” Alice says.
John nods serenely.
The sitting had gone on so long, Sophy did not look at the painting afterward, only fell asleep and was carried to bed. Who is the woman in front of her? It captures her best, her most intimate, her deepest self plainly surfaced. She has not even had time to see this face in the mirror, yet. Sophy turns and sees her parents’ faces. They are aghast, pained.
She flees upstairs and sits for long hours at her vanity, while bursts of shouting sound below her.
Her father comes first, his face red and mustache bristled. “Your sister has worked so hard to escape the gossips, you know, after all that business with Ruskin.”
Sophy crosses to the bed and pulls the cover to her chin.
“We’ve given you and John a great deal of trust, you understand, letting him chaperone you in London, and all those portrait sittings. I’d hate to think you were acting against the interests of the family.”
A critic, probably the first, who knows her best, snuggles in next to her. “Masterpiece,” he whispers.
“Remember your honor,” her father says, and leaves.
“Once-in-a-generation face,” the critic goes on. “Mature beyond her years.”
Effie comes next, once Sophy is already asleep, slamming the door open like a crack of thunder through a clear night. She seizes Sophy’s pearl-inlaid brush and uses it to wallop Sophy about the legs and shoulders.
“You slut,” she says. “You temptress. How could you do this to me again? You’re never going to see John again. I’ll never let you sit another portrait as long as I live.”
Another critic pets the angry red skin on Sophy’s thigh. “That penetrating gaze,” he sighs. “I wonder, what is the object of the desire spelled so clearly on her face?”
Effie yanks Sophy’s door so hard on the way out that it misses the latch and bangs right open again.
John is the final visitor. Just before the light comes crawling back over the horizon, he comes crawling into her bed, a solid wall of man. “My dear, my sweet muse, don’t worry about all this fuss.” He captures sections of her hair in his big fingers and winds them into unthinking knots. “When I unveil your portrait to society it will achieve such acclaim that your family will see this as an embarrassing overreaction and not speak of it again.”
When I unveil your portrait to society it will achieve such acclaim that your family will see this as an embarrassing overreaction and not speak of it again.
He touches his fingers against the neck he bared to her family.
“Great art moves us all, but not always in the same direction,” he says. “Don’t worry about Effie. She’ll come around.”
“Immortal life through painting, the most beautiful girl in Scotland, a wonder, a triumph, a star,” John and the critics chant softly through the night. Finally, when the light turns blueish, John slips away, and Sophy collapses in sleep.
1856
After John Millais marries Effie, she offers up Sophy to be his muse. “She owes me,” Effie says. “And I can’t bear the gossip from my divorce, I won’t be painted again.” John puts Sophy in two well-received, nostalgic portraits of the Scottish countryside: Autumn Leaves and Apple Blossoms.
In London, society is beside themselves over the debut of this earnest new muse. Not only is she unusually beautiful—not at all waifish but strong, hale, and determined—Sophy is the little sister of Effie Gray, and society is not done discussing that scandalous divorce.
“She’s perfectly captured in a year of change,” a critic says. “The only autumn where Sophy will be both girl and woman. Look at the flush of her cheeks! It hints at imminent sexual maturity, the way a flower hesitates before unfurling.”
Effie and John take Sophy to galleries, to houses, to studios; she sits for sketches and plays piano, but John won’t let any other painter have her. “I alone can tell Sophy’s story,” he says. “She’s far too complex for the rest of you.” When she turns thirteen, he tells her to wear the green dress to bring out the red in her hair.
“Have you noticed how impersonal a portrait is?” he asks, swiping charcoal on canvas like he is brushing away a fly. “How boring? How can you capture a person’s essence when you’re instructed to cover up this birthmark, do away with that mole, make larger the eyes and the lips. Infuriating. Not everyone has your natural beauty, Sophy.”
Finally, he paints, starting with her bold, upturned chin. It is a foundation on which to set her rouged lips, full and womanly and turned down not in a pout, but in knowing frankness. Her nose is imperfect; he includes the slight crooked curve of its bridge and sets her nostrils at a flare. Her cheeks—almost as red as her lips, stained with an inconsistent blush, and her hair—a mountain onto itself, or a river, maybe, made with red and brown and deepest black.
He works on her eyes late into night, until they cut through the portrait.
“It would ruin it if I knew what you were thinking,” he tells Sophy as he paints. “The allure is in what you restrain. But oh, how I wish.”
He sweeps his brush over the canvas. “How I wish, how I wish.”
Effie comes early in the morning to the room where Sophy is asleep upright and John is still painting, to bring him eggs. She looks at the painting, and looks at Sophy, and back at the painting, and back at Sophy. Her eyes narrow. John looks impossibly pleased with himself, nearly out of breath with the exertion of his talents. In the peripheries of the room, figures shift as if to move closer; critics, who can sense what Effie can sense, that this one is special.
1854
But at first, the critics don’t care about Sophy. They care about Effie. When Effie and Ruskin divorce, they’re everywhere. They speculate about why the marriage has gone unconsummated for so many years. Perhaps she has an odor, perhaps she is deformed in an un-pleasing way, perhaps she menstruates more than a woman should.
“How could you possibly understand?” Effie asks Sophy, tucked under her sister’s thin little arm. “You’re just eleven. I’ll die if I have to go to that doctor, I’ll simply die.”
The doctor is to determine the credibility of rumors that Effie has retained her virginity through six years of marriage. It will be useful in arguments of annulment.
“All because he doesn’t like my hair,” Effie moans.
She does not mean the hair on her head.
One morning, she wakes Sophy up in the hotel they are staying in in London for the months it takes to sort out Effie and Ruskin’s separation.
“You would do anything for me, right?” Effie asks. “Tell me you would. Don’t think I don’t know that you owe me.”
She gives Sophy a folded note and directions to John Millais’ studio.
“Don’t let them see you,” Effie says. She means the critics that follow her everywhere.
On the way, Sophy opens the note: Written: —and finally come together as one, my dear Mr. Millais, is it foolish to believe fate has allowed me to save myself for you? I await your hands along my sides, ache for them to—Sophy closes the note.
In the studio, Sophy sits and awaits his reply. While she waits, even her breath wanes, risking nothing from the humidity of her mouth. A stray blink, the lift of her collarbone with her breath, may distract Millais from his work. All around her, setting oil paint stretches and cracks as it dries. Millais presides in the center, busy in session.
“You have the most incredible patience,” he says, hours later, when he finally takes the note. Sophy says nothing, but her face more than makes up for it.
1852
Sophy turns nine, and her behavior is so good, her letters so neat, that her parents decide she will make the perfect chaperone and companion for Effie, who has gotten so lonely in London that she is beginning to act out. They have concerns about Effie taking up painting and arguing with her husband and his friends. Ruskin is a complicated man, but undeniably improves the Gray family fortunes.
“Be good, Sophy,” her mother says. “Help to keep them together, if you can.”
Effie squeals when she sees Sophy on the train platform.
“We’ll be proper society ladies,” Effie says. “You’ll see. I have us in fittings all day. You deserve a fine hat for your trouble. And we don’t let a single boorish man hold us back, not even Ruskin.”
They go to parties where Effie is at the center of every room, clever witticisms leveled at London’s pre-Raphaelites until they are nearly all falling at her feet with adoration. Effie teaches Sophy to kiss a cheek properly, to critique a painting for symbolism of its colors, and all of her laughs. Short, amused titters behind a hand or a fan; delighted, gay peals with their heads thrown back; even the derisive snort, which Effie says must only be deployed against a nemesis. Outside Ruskin’s house, Effie is bright and lovely and loud.
But inside, Sophy counts the taps of Effie’s fingers against a dinner table designed for twenty and used by three, until Ruskin reaches over and stills them.
When the sisters retire upstairs, Effie throws herself against Sophy’s big poster bed.
“Sophy, Sophy,” she wails. “Married five years and still a virgin. Could you even stand it?”
Effie flips herself to look at Sophy in the vanity mirror.
“When I was your age, I couldn’t keep him away. I’d half-fancy he likes little girls most of all. You stay away from Ruskin, Sophy, I don’t need the competition.” She throws a frilly little pillow at Sophy. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, though. You must never leave me.”
At the next party, Effie departs without Sophy, and Ruskin comes to her room with a book.
“I wrote this for your sister when she was young,” he says. “Do you want to know what happens?”
He sits in an armchair and pats his knee, draws little Sophy up into his lap with a hand around her waist. It’s a whimsical story, about a wicked brother and a kind one and their adventures through Austria. At the end, the wicked brother is turned to stone, and the kind one inherits their family’s lands. As he reads, Ruskin moves his hand all around; Sophy’s thigh, Sophy’s shoulder, Sophy’s thin little arm.
“Pretty little girls never stay that way,” he sighs. “I’d marry you, Sophy, but you’d only grow old on me.”
There are no critics in the room. There is no one to observe besides Sophy and Ruskin, not even to tell the story wrong.
“I don’t want to marry you,” says little Sophy.
“Shh,” answers Ruskin. “I’m thinking about the love you could give me, if I could only freeze you in time.” And he moves his hand around, all around.
At the train station when they leave London together, Effie cries into Sophy’s small shoulder, and Sophy stretches her arm to touch Effie’s hair, in a manner that might make up for what she has lost.
1882
Back to the asylum. John steps away from the canvas. He packs his paints, palettes, oil. The jars full of brushes and of stuff to clean the brushes. He folds the drop cloth. Sophy touches the back of her neck, which aches from holding still.
Her body will ache until she dies, which will be soon. The coroner will diagnose her death as a seventeen-year atrophy; rumors of suicide-by-starvation will be hard to substantiate. Effie will be in the room when it happens, firmly clasping Sophy’s cold hand between hers. She will bring a vase of flowers, news of her children, and before she leaves, touch Sophy’s face, to see if she can find something in there as expressive as what her husband put to canvas years ago.
Breeze cuts through the heady aroma of paint. John takes Sophy’s arm and leads her around the easel, careful to keep her slightly shaking body steady.
“Well?” he asks. Brown paint dapples his forehead where he swipes the back of his hand to clear a sheen of sweat. Gray, from her clothes, mottles his fingers.
The painting is simple and uninspired, the figure’s expression smiling and bland. “Disappointing,” a critic whispers. Sophy can’t see anything. Only black void at the center of the canvas, a nothingness her whole life has amounted to, her potential captured just once and given to the world before she could find it. She lifts her hand to reach to herself, in case herself is reaching back.
John smacks it away.
“I don’t want you to ruin it,” he says.