John Ruskin | autograph letter signed, to Miss Barnes, 20 April 1861, mentioning Rose La Touche

John Ruskin

Autograph letter signed, to Miss Barnes

mentioning his father, mother and Rose La Touche, while inviting her to dine with them (“...if it will not waste time too much - on our dual dullness - My fathers & mine: for my mother unhappily keeps her room...”); stating that he has received a long letter from “Rosie” who is in Florence but wants to get back to Ireland, 1 page, 8vo, 20 April 1861

The mention of Rose La Touche in this letter dates from the time of the first awakening of the forty-two year old Ruskin's love for the thirteen-year-old girl who he later determined to marry. The editor of the surviving fragments of Rose La Touche's diary (the first for her visit to Italy in 1861) stated that “perhaps nothing in Ruskin is more difficult to understand than his love for Rose La Touche”. A recent biographer (Wolfgang Kemp) while describing their relationship as “one of the great unhappy romances of the Victorian age” termed her as “far away the most important person” in Ruskin's adult life.

When his father died in 1864 (they wrote every day when apart) Ruskin wrote that he had lost “a father who would have sacrificed his life for his son, and yet forced his son to sacrifice his life to him, and sacrifice it in vain...”.