Anne Thackeray, Lady Ritchie

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Anne Ritchie in May 1870. Albumen print from Collodion negative

Anne Isabella, Lady Ritchie, née Thackeray (9 June 1837 – 26 February 1919) was an English writer. She was the eldest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray.

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 (1840–1875), who married Leslie Stephen in 1869. Anne, whose father called her "Anny", spent her childhood in France and England.

She married her cousin Richmond Ritchie in 1877.

Literary career

In 1863, Anne Isabella published The story of Elizabeth with immediate success.

Several works followed:

   * To Esther, and Other Sketches (1869)

   * The Village on the Cliff

   * Old Kensington

   * Tailors and Spinsters, and Other Essays

   * Bluebeard's Keys, and Other Stories

   * Five Old Friends

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

She also published the following novels:

   * Miss Angel (1875)

   * Miss Williamson's Divagations (1881)

   * Mrs. Dymond (1885)

   * A Book of Sibyls: Mrs. Barbauld, Mrs. Opie, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen(1883)

   * The biography Madame de Sévigné (1881)

   * The semi-autobiographical novella 'From An Island' (1877)

References
* Nina Auerbach, U. C. Knoepflmacher. Forbidden Journeys. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226032043.

   * Ann Martin. Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism's Fairy Tales. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0802090869. 

Further reading
* Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie. Chapters from Some Memoirs. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 0543920984.

   * "Introduction" by Anne Thackeray Ritchie in Our Village, fully and openly available online in the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature Digital Collection

family tree chart https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Complete%20PDFs/Shankman%20Anne/02...

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Anne's husband Richmond Ritchie was knighted in 1907, upon which she she became Lady Ritchie.

Attached to Media is a document giving Anne Thackeray Ritchie's family tree, chronology, and list of books. This information comes from Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Journals and Letters by Lillian F Shankman. There are three biographies:

1. Anne Thackeray Ritchie by Winifred Gerin, 1981. This is an enjoyable biography, marred by a few inaccuracies about house names etc. (Among the errors it should be noted she refers to a letter to Margaret Oliphant's "son" Denny - but Denny was Margaret Oliphant's niece!)

2. Anny by Henrietta Garnett, 2004. This is a well-written, absolutely fascinating biography. The Victorian interrelationships among ATR's extended family makes another interesting story in itself.

3. The Inheritance of Genius, A Thackeray Family Biography 1876-1919 by John Aplin, 2010. (This is the second volume of a Thackeray family biography, the first volume being Memory and Legacy, A Thackeray Family Biography 1798-1875 by John Aplin, 2011.) For those interested in William Makepeace Thackeray as well as his daughter Anne, both volumes make a great read. For those primarily interested in Anne, the second part of the second volume does contain new information and is best read after Anny, as a supplement to that biography.

(JPR)

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