Vivid Victorian portraits

Press, 10 March 1984, Page 18

Vivid Victorian portraits

Anne Thackeray Ritchie. By Winifred Gerin. Oxford University Press, 1983. 277 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography and index. $13.75 (paperback). (Reviewed by Margaret Quigley)

With splendid biographies of Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Elisabeth Gaskell, and Horatia Nelson already to her credit, Winifred Gerin seems to be cornering the market in interesting and readable lives of eminent Victorian women. Her fifth work, a life of William Makepeace Thackeray’s elder daughter, Anne, can only add lustre to her already considerable reputation. Thackeray himself, mainly because of the huge reputation of “Vanity Fair,” is probably one of the best known ana least read of the great Victorian writers. However, the facts of his life are not widely known and his daughter has dwindled into an obscurity which is certainly not deserved. Though working at first in the shadow of her renowned father, she too made a name for herself with her writing, not mainly for her novels, but for the vivid and perceptive pictures she left of her father and his notable contemporaries. “She will be the unacknowledged source of much that remains in men’s minds about the Victorian Age,” wrote Virginia Woolf. “She will be the transparent medium through which we behold the dead ... Above all and for ever she will be the companion and interpreter of her father ...” Born in 1837, and deprived early in life of the company of her mother who became insane after the birth of a second daughter, Anne Thackeray and her sister, Minny, were the constant

companions and confidantes of their father. They accompanied him on his travels, or lived in Paris with their grandparents, thus assimilating another culture. Their circle of friends included the Tennyson, Dickens, Browning, and Carlyle families. An informal but wide and liberal education and the influence of her father and friends directed her almost inevitably to writing herself. Anne produced eight novels, all of which were successful at the time, but her real talent as a writer was as a memorialist of the literary and artistic circles she knew so well for over 80 years. More particularly, her ability shows in the Biographical

Introductions which she wrote for the complete works of her father, but it was not only his generation that she captured in her writings. Her sister Minny married Leslie Stephen and through them she came in contact with the younger generation of writers — Swinburne, Hardy, Meredith, R.L.S., and Henry James. Annie herself married a much younger cousin, Richmond Ritchie, and created for him and their children a warm family life. She was not only gifted in the literary sphere; her zest for life, her loving personality and her never failing helpfulness made her deeply loved by all who knew her. Virginia Woolf left an enduring picture of her beloved aunt in “Night and Day” where the character of Mrs Bilberry “is made exactly like Lady Ritchie down to every detail.” Her portrait of an impulsive, unconventional, optimistic, and entirely lovable woman is reinforced by the many letters and tributes of her friends from which Winifred Gerin quotes freely. This first full length biography of a delightful personality is a splendid work, written with a deep knowledge of and warm sympathy for the subject and the age. Scholarly, but never pedantic, it contains as an additional bonus a picture of Thackeray, not as the cynic and snob he was so often thought, but as a caring parent devoted to his “little women.” “What comforts they are to me,” he wrote in 1854. “My dearest old Fat is the best girl I see anywhere: and I am brutally happy that she is not handsome enough to fall in love with: so that I hope she’ll stay by me for many a year yet.”