Anny: A Life of Anne Thackeray Ritchie (review)

The literary heritage of novelist-essayist Anne Thackeray Ritchie has been served in a piecemeal fashion that recalls her own oblique and kaleidoscopic manner of telling her life story. This most recent installment draws on the family papers of Leslie Stephen and their shared Bloomsbury descendants, including letters and manuscripts recently deposited at Eton College by Ritchie's granddaughter, Belinda Norman-Butler. The great-granddaughter of Stephen, Henrietta Garnett is the granddaughter of Vanessa Bell, the daughter of Angelica Garnett (Deceived with Kindness, [1984]), and a novelist in her own right (Family Skeletons, [1986]). Harriet ("Minny") Thackeray, daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray and sister to Anne, was Stephen's first wife, and for Stephen's second family with Julia Duckworth (most notably their daughter Virginia Woolf), Ritchie was the "Aunt Anny" who variously inspired and exasperated.

Unlike other life studies, Garnett's does not begin with her subject's childhood, but launches instead to the major turning point in Ritchie's life: her father's sudden death on Christmas Eve 1863. Entitled "The Desolate Sisters," this first section focuses on the close relationship between Ritchie and Minny, twenty-six and twenty-three years old respectively when Thackeray died, as they coped with their loss. It was during this period that Ritchie began forming alliances with a succession of surrogate mothers, including Jane Carlyle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Jane Brookfield, Adelaide Sartoris, and Emily Tennyson.

The core of Garnett's text and its longest section, "A Nest of Gentlefolk," takes up the ten-year period when Stephen entered the sisters' lives, marrying Minny in 1867, and forming an uneasy menage à trois. Ritchie's exuberance and economic imprudence continually provoked the orderly and frugal Stephen; what saved their relationship from breakdown were Ritchie's frequent travels and the leased cottages that served them all as vacation homes and retreats for Ritchie during her writing projects. Once Stephen and Ritchie each settled into the rhythm of their daily writing routines, their genuine affection for one another surfaced. Minny's death in 1875 upset this precarious balance. Locked into their shared grief and concerned about the mental stability of five-year-old Laura Stephen, Ritchie and Stephen maintained a single household until Ritchie's 1877 engagement to her second cousin Richmond, seventeen years her junior.

Although "Intimate Relations" concerns itself with the second half of Ritchie's life, it is the shortest of the three sections and includes several digressions. Garnett describes the events leading to Stephen's marriage with Duckworth—and makes vivid Stephen's incredible selfishness in the process—and dwells at considerable length on the threat to the Ritchie marriage when Richmond fell in love with Lionel Tennyson's widow, Eleanor. Brief critical forays concerning Ritchie as a novelist and memoirist follow, before Garnett rapidly concludes. The last twenty years of Ritchie's life are summed up in the equivalent of a single page, closing with her commemorative inscription at St. Agnes Church on the Isle of Wight: "Her writing reveals the inheritance of Genius, / Her life the inspiration of loving kindness" (273).

Throughout her study Garnett selectively comments on Ritchie's oeuvre, providing illustrative quotations and occasionally using them to interpret life experiences. Reading The Story of Elizabeth (1863), for instance, she observes that the character Jean Dampier constitutes "the prototype of a cross between a fairy godmother and a surrogate mother who will appear again and again in Anny's novels as well as figuring in her life" (51), while The Village on the Cliff (1867) demonstrates the cosmopolitan ease with which Ritchie moves back and forth between England and the continent, reflecting an early childhood largely spent in Paris with her grandmother. In Old Kensington (1873), probably the novel for which she is best known, Ritchie confronts "a deep, nebulous fear that her inability to let [the past] go would jeopardise her chances of any genuine future fulfillment" and resolves that fear by what Ritchie would only later call...