Anne Thackeray Ritchie
Journals and Letters
Lillian F. Shankman
Edited by Abigail Burnham Bloom and John Maynard
Peopled with such literary figures as Tennyson, Trollope, Browning, George Eliot, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, this book provides Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s complete journals written in 1864–65 and 1878, an ample selection of her most interesting letters, and a number of significant letters written to her. Because only small portions of each journal have been previously published, this important collection presents an essential document of Ritchie’s inner life, especially the account of her response to her father’s death.
As the daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, Anne Thackeray Ritchie was well acquainted with the literary social scene of London. At an early age she became her father’s companion and hostess after her mother went permanently insane; like her father, she became a best-selling writer of novels and articles. Her journals and letters offer a portrait of Ritchie, of her relationship with her father, and of mid-Victorian middle-class life in London and abroad.
Lillian Shankman’s lively narrative creates a useful context that enables the reader to follow the treads of biography and major themes in Ritchie’s thinking and works. Shankman furnishes the reader with an accurate and warm account of Ritchie’s exceptional life and milieu and her development as a woman of letters. Any future discussion of Ritchie must include this volume.