The Pre-Raphaelites started as a group of hard-up young artists, who roamed the streets around 1848, looking for striking young women whom they politely asked to pose. Rossetti and Holman Hunt were both fine painters, but Millais was a genius. He was also a remarkably nice man, and his marriage to John Ruskin’s former wife Effie is one of the great Victorian love stories. There is still no decent biography, but Jason Rosenfeld’s book John Everett Millais (Phaidon, £39.95) is the first monograph to appraise his complete career, and it is magnificent. It is lavishly illustrated in colour and black and white. Rosenfeld argues, rightly, that Millais didn’t sell out when he moved away from Pre-Raphaelitism but went on doing marvellous work. There are great portraits (Gladstone, in Christ Church , and Ruskin, in the Ashmolean), luminous Scottish landscapes which Van Gogh admired, and much more.

Both Rosenfeld and Henrietta Garnett, in her book Wives and Stunners: The Pre-Raphaelites and their Muses (Macmillan, £20) point out that “it is an unkind and often repeated verdict that Effie was detrimental to Millais’ art”. Effie was not only a muse but a remarkable woman who struck a blow for freedom when she escaped from Ruskin.

Wives and Stunners tells her story and also those of the other women who clustered around the Pre-Raphaelites and inspired some masterpieces. They are often sad stories, but it’s an enjoyable book. Lizzie Siddal is a tragic figure; Jane Morris (an Oxford girl) was very picturesque but not exactly admirable; Georgie Burne-Jones was a heroine. Little is said about Holman Hunt, although he too had an interesting marital history.

Holman Hunt’s painting The Light of the World, from Keble College, and other Pre-Raphaelite paintings from the Ashmolean Museum and Christ Church, have left Oxford to join the blockbuster exhibition The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant Garde, at Tate Britain from September 12 until January 13.

There is a free lunchtime talk on Oxford and the Pre-Raphaelites at the Ashmolean on Friday. Numbers limited, tokens available from information desk at 1pm (no advance booking). Merryn Williams’s Effie: A Victorian Scandal (Book Guild, £16.99) is to be reissued next year to coincide with a Hollywood film about Effie.