Death
Rose died in 1875 at the age of 27, in a Dublin nursing home, where she had been placed by her parents. Various authors describe the death as arising from either madness, anorexia, a broken heart, religious mania or hysteria, or a combination of these. Whatever the cause, her death was tragic and it is generally credited with causing the onset of bouts of insanity in Ruskin from around 1877. He convinced himself that the Renaissance painter Vittore Carpaccio had included portraits of Rose in his paintings of the life of Saint Ursula. He also took solace in Spiritualism, trying to contact Rose's spirit.
Rose and Ruskin's romance is alluded to in Nabokov's novel Lolita. According to Wolfgang Kemp "the whole work is riddled with allusions and direct references to the la Touches".
Read more about this topic: Rose La Touche
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)