He was on very good terms with her family - her brother Albert called him 'a man of great nobility' - and he wrote to John La Touche that 'every blessing and success has accompanied our marriage'. Millais was a strikingly attractive man and we know from his letters that some women threw themselves at him, but I am sure that he remained faithful to Effie. But that is a long way from a full-blown love affair, and Ms Cooper concludes that 'maybe he had nothing to hide'. He may well have found her attractive as a teenager she may well have had a crush on him.
He and Effie were deeply concerned about her as a beloved and troubled younger sister.
When she was thirty-seven he told his wife that he was very keen to paint 'poor Sophie' (no hint of marital problems there) and produced a sad image of a prematurely aging woman (you can see it in 'Millais: Portraits', edited by Peter Funnell). The lovely portrait painted by Millais when she was fourteen was immediately sold to George Price Boyce. Indeed we know from Louise Jopling's book 'Twenty Years of my Life' that Effie and Sophie were in Paris together the year before her death. She was anorexic and disturbed, so by that time it would have been difficult for anyone to have romantic feelings about her - the man she eventually married, James Caird, was not told. This establishes that Sophie was 'sent away' from her home in Perth in 1868 and placed in an asylum at Chiswick, near Effie and Millais who were among the few people who knew about her condition. I've carefully studied the new evidence about Sophie in Suzanne Cooper's book. We don't know much about our grandparents' lives but we do know how rumours can snowball. That was written in 1967 when all the people involved and their children were long dead. The rumour was started by Mary Lutyens in 'Millais and the Ruskins' - 'a story in the Millais family that she and Millais became too fond of each other and that Effie sent her away'. I'm really not convinced that there was any kind of love triangle involving Sophie.
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