Anne Isabella Ritchie was an English writer. The annals of English literature hold a place for Anne not just for her own well-received novels, short stories, and memoirs, but for her family connections as well. She was the daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity'Fair, and step-aunt to Virginia Woolf.
Background
Anne Ritchie was born on June 9, 1837, in London, United Kingdom. She was the eldest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray and Isabella Gethin Shawe. Anne lived in the Bloomsbury Square area of London during her early years. Her father was twenty-six years old when she was born. He had studied art in France, and was a freelance writer and illustrator. But with the 1840 birth of a sister, Harriet Marrion Thackeray, mother Isabella Thackeray grew increasingly unstable. In order to pay for his wife’s care, William Thackeray directed his talents to the writing of satirical pieces on upper-class life in England. This launched his career in earnest. The two daughters were sent to Paris to live with grandparents, but were back in London by 1846 with their father, who settled in the London section of Kensington. Isabella Thackeray would be confined to hospitals for the remainder of her life.
Career
Anne began helping her father in his work at the age of fourteen. By this time he had written the acclaimed satirical novel Vanity Fair and was beginning to work on Henry Esmond. She took dictation from him and copied his manuscripts. Both she and her sister, Minny, were close to their father, who brought them along on his extended trips to Europe and the United States. As a result of the acclaim accorded Thackeray, the two young women became acquainted with a host of leading literary figures of the day and could count among their acquaintances the children of Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Charlotte Bronte.
In 1860 William Thackeray began a magazine called Cornhill and that same year Ritchie experienced her first literary success when it published her story “Little Scholars,’’ based on visits she had made to charity schools that served the poor in London. Two years later, Cornhill began serializing her first novel, The Story of Elizabeth. The plot, like many of her subsequent novels, has as its psychological core a problematic mother-daughter relationship.
In 1863, William Thackeray died unexpectedly on Christmas Eve. He had left Ritchie and her sister financially provided for, but emotionally the loss was made all the more difficult due to their mother’s situation. However, the sisters were surprised to find that they could stand on their own merit inside England’s social and intellectual circles, and Ritchie forged ahead with her writing. After spending time in Normandy, she used the French coastal area as one of the settings for her 1867 novel The Village on the Cliff. Another acclaimed novel from Ritchie published during this period of her career was the 1873 tale Old Kensington, for which she drew upon her memories of her childhood neighborhood.
Since 1867 Ritchie had lived with Minny and her husband, Leslie Stephen. In 1875, Minny died in childbirth, a loss that certainly devastated her sister and only sibling. The Stephens already had a daughter who was developmentally disabled, and so Ritchie remained in the Hyde Park house of her brother-in-law to help care for the children.
Ritchie married in 1877. This new role as wife and mother did not abate her creative energies. Her books from this era include From an Island: A Story and Some Essays, published in 1877 and based upon her extended stays on the Isle of Wight with a circle of friends that included the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, the critic John Ruskin, and Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll. Ritchie also published her sole work of full-length biography, Madame de Sevigne, in 1881, and that same year also saw the appearance of a well-received collection of her short stories, Miss Williamson's Divagations.
What would be Ritchie’s final novel, Mrs. Dymond, appeared in 1885. In the 1890s Ritchie devoted her time to writing memoirs and to the adjunct text that would accompany the collected works of her father. Her wealth of friendships with some of the Victorian era's greatest names became the basis for several works, such as 1892’s Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Robert and Elizabeth Browning, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson and His Friends: A Series of 25 Portraits from the Negatives of Mrs. Julia Margaret Cameron and H. H. H. Cameron.
During these years Ritchie remained close to the Stephen household. Leslie Stephen eventually remarried, and two daughters resulted from this second union, Vanessa and Virginia. Ritchie spent a great deal of time with these step-nieces, the younger of which, born in 1882, would found the Hogarth Press with her husband Leonard Woolf in 1917 and emerge as an influential force in English literature in that coming century.
A great deal of Ritchie’s energies during the 1890s were directed toward writing the biographical and critical introductions to her father’s collected works, which were published in thirteen volumes between 1894 and 1895 as Works of William Makepeace Thackeray with Biographical Introduction by His Daughter.
Ritchie, whose husband's knighthood in 1907 allowed the title “Lady” to precede her name, was widowed in 1912. In 1914, several of her friends - Portrait of a Lady author Henry James among them - contributed funds to commission of a portrait of Ritchie by the renowned artist John Singer Sargent. She continued to write even well into her seventies. Her final work was From the Porch, a collection of essays on female writers such as George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, and longtime friend Margaret Oliphant as well as discussions of Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, and Tennyson.
When her house in London's Chelsea section was struck by a bomb in early 1918. Ritchie and her daughter Hester removed to their other home on the Isle of Wight. It was here that Ritchie died at the age of eighty-one the following February. A final work - another volume of personal recollections, some of them recounting the early career of her father - was published posthumously in 1919.
Anne Ritchie is famous for short fiction that places traditional fairy tale narratives in a Victorian milieu. Her best known work is novel Mrs. Dymond, which was published in 1885. Anne is also remembered as the custodian of her father's literary legacy, the author of Vanity Fair.
In 1877, to the surprise of many, Ritchie married her second cousin, Richmond Thackeray Ritchie, who was seventeen years her junior. She was forty years old at the time. Her husband was a civil servant, and held a variety of posts at the India Office, which oversaw the administration of the “jewel in the crown,” the rich and vast colonial possession of the Indian subcontinent. Richmond Thackeray Ritchie would eventually be named permanent undersecretary of state for India and be knighted for his years of service. In the three years following their marriage, the Ritchies had two children, Hester Helena Thackeray and William Makepeace Denis.
