Thank God that we live now and not in the 19th century; even if half the globe was coloured pink in those days. I always say that to myself after visits to the dentist; and I said it to myself again after reading Effie: A Victorian Scandal (Book Guild Publishing, £16.99) by the poet and editor of The Interpreter’s House magazine, Merryn Williams, who lives in North Oxford with her husband John Hemp, a retired physics lecturer from Cranfield University.

The book tracks the extraordinary tale of Euphemia Gray (1828-1897), a Scottish girl so beautiful that she was known as the Fair Maid of Perth, who managed to escape from one disastrous marriage to writer and thinker John Ruskin – the most eminent art critic of the Victorian age and the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University – and then married John Everett Millais, the most successful artist of the reign (at any rate following the death of JMW Turner).

Ms Williams said: “I was inspired to write the book after seeing the Millais exhibition in London in 2007. The story just got hold of me. I found that there wasn’t a book in defence of Effie – so I was forced to write it myself. She seems to have had such a bad press for so long that someone had to stand up for her.”

Myths have grown up about what exactly happened during what must surely rank as the the worst wedding night ever – which occurred at an inn in Blair Atholl on April 10, 1848, when 19-year-old Effie (as Ms Gray was known) and 29-year-old Ruskin beheld each other naked for the first time; but the truth is that Ruskin found himself “disgusted by her person” – as he later declared – and then left her alone and intact for the next seven years of their sham marriage.

“The fact is,” Ms Williams explained, “He only liked very young girls.”

All the same, such was the status of Holy Matrimony in those days that Effie found herself trapped, hook, line and sinker and almost certainly for life, by the brilliant but monk-like aesthete.

But the paradox here is that it was only because she did not have an affair with the handsome young Jack (as Millais was known), when the three went off to a remote Scottish glen together with the intention of Millais painting Ruskin’s portrait, that she eventually got away at all.

Ms Williams said: “Both accepted the morality of the time”. That meant that many years later, after Effie had been subjected to a physical examination by two male doctors, it was established by a Church court that the marriage had not been consummated and was, therefore, annulled – leaving Effie free to marry Jack and subsequently bear him eight children.

Looking back from the vantage point of the comparatively godless present, it seems amazing that any woman could have been put through the trials that Effie suffered – and yet, even after suffering them, she was never really treated as “a respectable woman”. For instance Queen Victoria refused to receive her for many years, even though her husband was considered a pillar of society and was eventually made a baronet.

In a way there is little wonder that Ms Williams felt forced to write this book: after all she is an expert on the subject of Victorian women, having already written Women in the English Novel 1800-1900 (Macmillan) and Effie’s story provides a sharp, very personal insight into the hypocrisies inherent in a society which, for instance, allowed men to divorce on the grounds of their wives’ adultery, but not the other way round.

But Ms Williams has tried to be fair to Ruskin too. And as for Millais, her voice takes on a wistful sort of timbre when she comments: “Millais was lovely.”

Poor Ruskin, he tried to live up to his own ideals and morals about art and beauty (he resigned his Oxford chair because he was against animal experiments), but in later life was again driven mad with love for a young girl, Rose La Touche, who was only ten when he first met her. For her part Rose La Touche was worried about Ruskin, not because of his predilection for young girls, but because he seemed to have decided there was no God. Ms Williams said: “Society itself was not nice.”

She asserts that Ruskin wanted a wife he could mould into the person he wanted. And most Victorians would probably have agreed with George Eliot’s statement in Middlemarch: “A woman, let her be as good as she may, has got to put up with the life her husband makes for her.”

But social mores change all the time. Ms Williams, who went up to Cambridge University shortly after her father Raymond Williams, the left-wing author and former Oxford University tutor in adult education, had become an academic there, told me: “That was in the 1960s. But I had no idea then that I was living through a sort of social revolution.”