Something stopped her mother from holding Anny under the water until she breathed no more; ‘perhaps the terror in Anny’s eyes,’ says Henrietta Garnett in this engaging new portrait. Anny’s mother was deemed to be irretrievably mad and packed off to Camberwell, where she was looked after by a Mrs Bakewell, never to return to her family. (Charlotte Brontë was horrified when readers of Jane Eyre assumed that she had based the story of Mrs Rochester on the tragedy of Thackeray’s wife.)
Despite this early trauma, Anny appears to have been admirably lacking in self-pity. ‘Be grateful. Be cheerful and do not be afraid. Fewer bonnets,’ she reminded herself in 1864 just a few months after her father’s sudden death from an apoplexy, aged 52. Like Thackeray, Anny was irredeemably extravagant, forever indulging in new bonnets, keepsakes and yards of the finest silk for those enormous crinolines fashionable at the time.
Like her father, too, Anny was a writer, publishing at first short stories and then novels in the Cornhill Magazine, which Thackeray had edited. Novels such as Old Kensington, From an Island and Mrs Dymond are forgotten now but were hugely popular then, running into several editions. George Eliot confessed that she ‘could not resist’ them. From the tantalising glimpses of them given to us by Henrietta Garnett, Anny would appear to have had a wonderfully dry and self-deprecating sense of humour.
Leslie Stephen, the writer and creator of the Dictionary of National Biography, scolded Anny: ‘The one thing that vexes me about your work is that you haven’t enough respect for your talent & your calling.’ A common enough fault among women writers. As a penniless academic, Stephen had moved in with the sisters when he married Minny in 1867. All went smoothly with this ménage à trois while Minny was alive, but she died suddenly eight years later, from complications while pregnant, leaving the petulant Leslie and infuriatingly vivacious Anny to rub along together without her.
Perhaps this is what prompted Anny to marry the cousin, Richmond Ritchie, with whom she had been hopelessly in love since he was a schoolboy at Eton. When they married, she was 40 and he was 23. It was a disaster, Richmond experiencing what Henrietta Garnett refers to (but does not explain) as ‘a nervous breakdown’ on their honeymoon. They did have two children, but Richmond later succumbed to a series of affairs. Anny ruefully admitted many years later that she ‘had not loved Richmond enough to say no’.
She was immortalised by Virginia Woolf, the daughter of Leslie Stephen and his second wife Julia Duckworth, as Mrs Hilbery in Night and Day. Henrietta Garnett is the great-granddaughter of Leslie Stephen, and her book about Anny reads like an intimate family history. Pen sketches from the letters of Anny, Minny, their father and Leslie Stephen pepper the text, enhancing the sense that you are rummaging through a box of family papers searching for the truth about a favourite great-aunt.
Should we still be reading Anny? In Mrs Dymond, she writes, ‘People’s lives as they really are and people’s lives … as they imagine them to be, are very different. And yet reality has often a great deal more spirit and inventions in it than the most romantic daydreams.’ A sharp and telling insight. My only quibble with this compelling evocation of a staunch Victorian lady is that she occasionally disappears, overlooked by the eminent characters who surrounded her.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.