My mother died when I was fourteen, two years after the birth of my brother, William. I remember her lovely chamber transformed into a sickrooom, with heavy wreaths of flowers on every piece of furniture; she pale and thin, but still beautiful to the end.

My father was with her all the time, his face unreadable. One day, passing the room without entering, I heard him weeping in violent abandon, and my mouth twisted in derision; I prided myself in feeling nothing.

Her grave was placed in the churchyard just outside the entrance to the church, so that my father could see it as he greeted his parishioners. I had often wondered how such a stern, God-fearing man had come to marry such a delicate, worldly creature. That he might have passions I could not guess at made me uneasy, and I dismissed such thoughts.

When I was twenty-five my father died. I was completing my Grand Tour at the time, and did not hear of it until all was over. It seemed that during the winter he had caught a cold, had neglected it-he hardly ever lit fires in the house except in the bitterest weather-had refused to take to his bed and, one day in church, had collapsed. Fever set in and he died without recovering consciousness, leaving me with a tidy fortune and an inexplicable feeling that now he was dead he would be able to watch over all my movements.

I moved to London: I had a certain talent for drawing and wished to establish myself as an artist. There I discovered the British Museum and the Royal Academy, and steeped myself in art and sculpture. I was determined to make a name for myself: I rented a studio in Kennington and spent my first five years accumulating enough work for my first exhibition. I painted allegorical portraits especially, taking a great deal of my ideas from Shakespeare and classical mythology, working in oils for the most part, that medium being the most suitable for the meticulous, detailed work I liked. One visitor who came to see my work told me that the style was ‘quite Pre-Raphaelite’, which delighted me, and I took care to nurture this similarity, even taking subjects from Rossetti’s poetry-although I felt that the poet, as a man, was very far from the kind of person I should like to emulate.

My main problem was finding suitable models, for I had few friends in London and, after a most embarrassing experience near the Haymarket, did not dare to approach likely females with offers of work. I had no interest in painting men: I found more poetry in the female form, and a certain type of female form at that. I advertised in The Times, but found that from twenty or so applicants only one or two were even passably handsome, and that none of them could be termed ‘respectable’ women. As long as they didn’t open their vulgar mouths I did not complain, however, which is why, when I look back at some of my earlier works, I find it hard to trust my memory, recollecting that sweet-faced Juliet had an illegitimate child or innocent Cinderella an addiction to the gin-bottle. I learned more about women in those days than I ever wished to know. In spite of their pretty faces, listening to their conversations, their lewdness, their unclean thoughts, I despised them.

Several of them tried their cheap seductions upon me, but at that time the serpent within me was well under control: I went to church every Sunday, painted at my studio during the day and relaxed at a respectable club in the evenings. I had a small circle of acquaintances, but found little need for company. After all, I had my art. I even fancied that women had no power over me, that I had finally conquered the stirrings of my sinful flesh. Such conceit is the wheel upon which God breaks sinners; but time runs on a short leash, and I must skim over three more years to a time when I was just thirty-three, to the clear autumn day when I met my nemesis.

I had been painting children for some time: it was always easy to find a beautiful child whose mother was willing to spare her for a few hours a day. I paid them a shilling an hour, and it was more than some of these women themselves earned. Thus I was walking in the park as I often did when I happened to catch sight of a woman and a child: the woman a dowdy customer in black, the child a little girl of about ten with such unusual and striking features that I stopped to stare after her.

She was a thin child, wrapped in an ugly black cape which looked like someone else’s hand-me-down, but she moved with a grace unusual in one of her age, and her hair was a most troubling colour, a shade closer to white than gold, so that for an instant she looked like a little old crone, some changeling among the happy, rosy children around her. Her face was pointed and almost colourless but for her large, deep eyes; her lips were full for a child’s, but pale; her expression quaintly tragic.

I knew instantly that I had to have her as my model: there was an infinite promise of expression in her face; each movement was a masterpiece of definition. Looking at her I knew that child would be my salvation; her innocence moved me as much as her spectral beauty, and there were tears in my eyes as I ran towards the couple. For a moment my heart was too full for me to speak.

The girl’s name was Effie; the dowdy woman was her aunt. She lived with her aunt and her mother above a little milliner’s shop in Cranbourn Alley and they were of a respectable type: the mother, Mrs Shelbeck, was a widow, living in straitened circumstances. A shrill, annoying woman, I later found, with none of her daughter’s striking looks, and my offer of a shilling an hour was accepted without any of the modesty and reserve usually exhibited by genteel families. I suspect that if I had offered half the sum it would have been accepted with equal alacrity-as it was, I would have gladly offered double.

Effie came to my studio-respectably accompanied by the aunt-that very week, and I spent a whole morning simply drawing the child from various angles: profile, three-quarter, full-face, head high, head to one side…each more enchanting than the last. She was a perfect model: she did not shuffle and fidget as did other children, nor did she chatter or smile. She seemed overawed by the studio and by me, studying me covertly with an expression of respectful wonder. She came again; after the third time the aunt ceased to come with her.

My first painting of her was called My Sister’s Sleep, from the Rossetti poem, and it took two months to complete: only a small canvas, but I flattered myself that I had caught the look of Effie. I painted her lying on a little narrow bed such as children use, a cross on the white wall above her and a vase of holly on the bedstand beside her, the family’s concession to the Christmas spirit. Her brother was sitting on the floor beside the bed, his head buried in the coverlet, and her mother, in black, was standing at the foot of the bed with her face in her hands. The painting focused on Effie; the other figures were faceless and dark-clad, but she was all in white, wearing a ruffled nightdress I had bought for the painting, her hair spread out on the pillow all around her. Her arms were bare, one hanging limply by her side, the other tucked childishly under her cheek. The light from the window transfigured her, promising redemption in death, the purity of the innocent who dies young. It was a theme close to my heart and I was to repeat it many times in the next seven years. Sometimes I was reluctant to let her go home in the evenings for she was growing so fast that I was afraid to lose even an hour of her company.

Effie never spoke a great deal: she was a quiet little thing, untouched by the conceit and vanity exhibited by other girls of the same age. She read avidly-especially poetry, Tennyson, Keats, Byron, Shakespeare-hardly any of it suitable for a child, although her mother seemed to pay little attention to the fact. I ventured to point this out to Effie one day and was pleased to find her properly attentive to my advice. I told her that poetry, although unexceptionable reading for, say, a young man, was rather too difficult for a susceptible young girl. The subject matter was too frequently indelicate, the passions too violent. I offered to lend her some good, improving books, and was delighted when she read them dutifully. There was no wilfulness in her: she seemed created to embody all the feminine virtues without any of the perversity of that sex.