Anne Thackeray Ritchie

Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates Template:Use British English Template:Wikidata image Anne Isabella, Lady Ritchie (Template:Nee Thackeray; 9 June 1837 – 26 February 1919), eldest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, was an English writer, whose several novels were appreciated in their time and made her a central figure on the late Victorian literary scene. She is noted especially as the custodian of her father's literary legacy, and for short fiction that places fairy tale narratives in a Victorian milieu. Her 1885 novel Mrs. Dymond introduced into English the proverb, "If you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn."Template:Sfnp

Life

Anne Isabella Thackeray was born in London, the eldest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray and his wife Isabella Gethin Shawe (1816–1893). She had two younger sisters: Jane, born in 1839, who died at eight months, and Harriet Marian (nicknamed "Minny") (1840–1875), who married Leslie Stephen in 1869. Anne, whose father called her Anny, spent her childhood in France and England, where she and her sister were accompanied by the future poet Anne Evans.

In 1877, she married her cousin, Richmond Ritchie, who was 17 years her junior. They had two children, Hester and Billy. She was a step-aunt of Virginia Woolf, who penned an obituary of her in the Times Literary Supplement. She is also thought to have inspired the character of Mrs Hilbery in Woolf's Night and Day.

File:Lady Ritchie (Miss Thackeray) c1890 Hollyer.jpg

Photo of Lady Ritchie (c. 1890)

Literary career

In 1863, Anne Isabella published The Story of Elizabeth with immediate success. Several other works followed:

• The Village on the Cliff (1867)
• To Esther, and Other Sketches (1869)
• Old Kensington (1873)
• Toilers and Spinsters, and Other Essays (1874)
• Bluebeard's Keys, and Other Stories (1874)
• Five Old Friends (1875)
• Madame de Sévigné (1881), a biography with literary excerpts

In other writings, she made unusual use of old folk stories to depict modern situations and occurrences, such as Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood.

She also wrote the following:

• Miss Angel (1875)
• From An Island (1877), a semi-autobiographical novella
• Miss Williamson's Divagations (1881)
• A Book of Sibyls: Mrs. Barbauld, Mrs. Opie, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen (1883), a collection of biographies concerning women writers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries
• (1885; reprinted 1886 & 1890)

References

Bibliography

• Aplin, John. The Inheritance of Genius – A Thackeray Family Biography, 1798–1875, Lutterworth Press (2010). Template:ISBN
• Aplin, John. Memory and Legacy – A Thackeray Family Biography, 1876–1919, Lutterworth Press (2011). Template:ISBN
• Aplin, John (editor). The Correspondence and Journals of the Thackeray Family, 5 vols., Pickering & Chatto (2011).
• "Introduction" by Anne Thackeray Ritchie in Our Village, fully and openly available online in the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature Digital Collection

External links

• Template:Internet Archive author
• Template:Librivox author
• Genealogy of Anne Thackeray Ritchie
• Template:UK National Archives ID
• Anne Isabella Thackeray at Victorian Web