by Gillian Gill
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As it turned out, Minny Thackeray Stephen needed none of operatic Rosina’s traps to ensnare a husband and keep him happy in her thrall. From the time of their honeymoon, spent inevitably in Switzerland, but in a luxury hotel, not a mountain hut, Leslie loved being married to a delightful, accommodating, intelligent woman who could pay for the luxuries she had grown up with. He and Minny got on perfectly in society and in bed, and she afforded him pleasures and comforts he had barely dreamed of in youth. Theirs was a very happy marriage.
Leslie had a fine mind and worked hard, and, propelled by the Thackeray connections and Minny’s delightful dinner parties, his professional career blossomed and bore fruit. As we saw in Chapter 4, a few years into the marriage, the editorship of Thackeray’s beloved Cornhill was offered to Leslie by George Smith, William Thackeray’s publisher and devoted friend, at the splendid salary of five hundred pounds a year. Thereafter Stephen’s reputation and earnings grew steadily, and after some seven years of marriage, during which he had lived in houses owned or rented, in fact if not law, by his wife and her sister, he was able to purchase a home for his growing family. Minny, who had her father William Makepeace Thackeray’s gift for drawing and his refined taste in art and furnishings, joyfully undertook to design and decorate her new home. Anny was more and more away with friends and relatives, writing her books, living her own life, and the Thackeray sisters seemed, at last, to accept that life must carry them apart.
If there was a shadow over the married life of Leslie and Minny, it was Minny’s ill health. Both Stephens were anxious to have children, but Minny found it hard to conceive and harder to bring a child to term. Her first child, a son, was a late miscarriage. Her second child, a daughter named Laura Makepeace, was born, as she herself had been, months premature. When, four years later, Minny became pregnant again and, despite complications, seemed likely to bring the child to term, both Stephens were overjoyed.
In November of 1875, the Stephens were sitting down to dinner in their new home when their dear friend Julia Jackson Duckworth dropped in, as she often did, to discuss some philanthropic mission with Minny. The Stephens begged Julia to sit down and share the delicious soup puree Minny had ordered up from the kitchen, but Julia insisted on rushing away. As she later recorded, her two friends’ shining love and happiness formed an unbearable contrast with the darkness of the widowed life that had been hers for five years.
Just hours later, Minny Stephen awoke, complaining of terrible pain, and then went into convulsions. She was suffering, it seems clear, from eclampsia, a condition attendant on pregnancy that still kills women today. The doctor was called but there was nothing to be done, and Minny Stephen died in horrible pain. It was Leslie’s birthday, and he never celebrated that day again.
Minny’s death was the first great tragedy of Leslie Stephen’s life, and he feared he would never recover from his loss. For Anne Thackeray it was the third great tragedy, following on her mother’s fall into insanity as a young woman and her father’s untimely death. Minny was the person Anny loved most in the world now that her father was dead, and sisters, unlike wives, cannot be replaced. All the same, Anny knew from grim experience that the clouds would part someday and that she had best enjoy the sunshine when at last it came.
For some two years, Leslie and Anny clung together for support. They gave up the house that was stamped in Minny’s image and moved for comfort into a property Minny and Anny had inherited from their grandmother, at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington. The house was virtually next door to Julia Duckworth and her children. Brother- and sister-in-law mourned, each in his and her way, but imperceptibly each was also reaching out to the future. Thanks to the old and close friendship between Anne and Julia, and the physical proximity between the two families, Leslie was able to get close to his neighbor Mrs. Duckworth in ways that did not endanger her reputation—talking in the evening, walking in Richmond Park, baring their souls in long, regular letters. Anne Thackeray, meanwhile, was discovering to her incredulous delight that the pleasure she had always felt in the company of her cousin Richmond Ritchie was fully reciprocated.
Anne had known Richmond literally from birth: she was eighteen years his senior, and his mother and her sisters were her father’s first cousins. Members of the large and sociable Thackeray-Ritchie clan were forever visiting one another in Kensington or Windsor and traveling on the Continent in large, luggage-laden packs. Richmond was a handsome and charming boy who grew into a brilliant young man, winning a Kings Scholarship to Eton, a champion at fives—a ball game played at Eton—elected to the exclusive club called Pop, and duly proceeding on to Trinity College, Cambridge. An outstanding student, Richmond was reading for the classics Tripos and expected to go on to a remarkable career. His success was important, as his mother was a widow with a small income and many children.
But Richmond was also strong-willed, and when he decided that Anne Thackeray, though so very much older, was the most wonderful woman he had ever met and he wanted to marry her, he could not be dissuaded. As for Anne herself, as she later wrote, she loved Richmond very much, but not enough to be unselfish and send him away. Their relationship became passionate, and when Richmond proposed, Anne accepted. He left Cambridge in a hurry and took a junior but paying position at the Colonial Office, and the wedding date was set for a day in late August when the bridegroom could get twenty-four hours’ leave.
No one in the Ritchie-Thackeray family was happy about the marriage, but everyone loved Anny, so they quickly accepted her as Richmond’s wife. Julia Duckworth rejoiced that her old friend Anne had at last found someone to love her and offer the chance of happiness after so much pain. But Leslie Stephen was outraged. Leslie rated women on their looks, not their brains, and he had never seen Anne Thackeray as attractive. Like her father, he assumed that she would never marry. Leslie Stephen had married, in a sense, two Thackeray women, not one, and after death had snatched one away from him, the second remained to be counted on. Now the second was entering into an almost incestuous relationship with a man young enough to be her son. How could Leslie Stephen be expected to bear it?
The conflict over Anne’s engagement to Richmond deepened the rift in the relationship between Anne and Leslie that had already arisen over the treatment of his daughter, Laura. Minny and Anny saw quite clearly and early on that, in comparison to the little daughters of Edward Thackeray whom they had temporarily adopted, Laura was slow to develop both physically and mentally. Minny’s response had been to love her child, meet her special needs with sympathy and intelligence, and help her overcome her problems. Anny endorsed her sister’s approach.
Leslie faced up to his child’s problems only after his wife died and he became wholly responsible for her. Laura became, as he saw it, naughty and willful, and her conduct aggravated her father’s grief and loneliness and made him angry. Anne was willing to take on the care of her niece, as she had once done for her small cousins, but Leslie would have none of that. He thought Anne was being weak and told her that he would deal with his daughter as he saw fit. If Anne persisted in interfering, she would no longer be welcome in his home.
Leslie’s view of Laura and his plan for her were very much the result of the counsel and support he was receiving from Julia Duckworth. By the time Anne and Richmond were engaged, Leslie Stephen had finally persuaded Julia Duckworth to become his wife, and Julia was convinced that her husband must take a very firm line with his child. Thus, even as relations between the Thackeray-Ritchies and the Stephen-Duckworths were smoothed over enough to bring Leslie and Julia to Anne and Richmond’s wedding, beneath the surface Leslie Stephen’s feelings toward his former sister-in-law were still raw, and he lashed out to wound her as, he felt, she had wounded him.
Thus, in preparation for his remarriage, Leslie made a will that included guardianship provisions for his daughter, Laura. Anne Thackeray, Laura’s devoted aunt, was the obvious choice as guardian, but Leslie Stephen passed over her. Instead he appoin
ted Anne’s new husband, Richmond Ritchie, a young man he loathed, and his own wife-to-be, Julia Duckworth. Leslie further stipulated that Julia should henceforth exercise over Laura the full rights and authority of a mother.
Anne Thackeray Ritchie had deeply loved and sought to protect her sister, Minny. When Minny died, the love and protection were extended to Minny’s daughter, a child in obvious need of both. Having been thrust out of Laura’s life, Anne Thackeray Ritchie could hardly have been blamed had she refused to have anything more to do with Leslie Stephen. But she did not. Taking courage from her new married happiness, she kept the lines of communication open between her own family and the family of her friends Leslie and Julia. They had made it plain that they would resent and fear any attempt to interfere in Laura’s care. That was nonnegotiable. But at least Anne could come to the Stephens’ house every now and then, ask to see her niece, take her in her arms, and watch, if only from afar. It was not much, but it was something. And in Julia and Leslie’s two daughters, Vanessa and Virginia, so different yet so alike in their aspirations, close allies yet rivals for familial love and affection, Anne could see something of herself and Minny.
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There are strong parallels between Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Virginia Woolf. Both were exceptionally sensitive and intelligent, and both were subjected to tragic bereavements early in life that left them mentally scarred. If Virginia was, from time to time, mad, Anne was subject to periods of mental and physical collapse throughout her life. In an age when eccentricity was almost the norm, she was seen as more than a little crazy. Both Anne and Virginia, when not ill, were exceptionally loving, creative, hardworking, and achieving. From the age of four, Anne had known the inside of a mental asylum, though as a visitor, not a patient, and her life was inflected by the problem and the inheritance of madness.
Like Virginia Woolf, Anne Thackeray waited for years before finding a man she felt able to marry. Both Richmond Ritchie and Leonard Woolf were, in different ways, controversial partners, and in choosing them against the advice of friends and family, Anne Thackeray and Virginia Stephen each took a leap of faith that paid off.
And of course, and above all, both Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Virginia Woolf were not just writers but authors who published articles and books, found a dedicated readership, earned fees and advances, and knew their trade. Both wrote memoirs and autobiographical essays.
Anne Thackeray Ritchie was aware of a number of good women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries whose books were out of favor. She wrote a series of short biographies in an attempt to make sure these women were not erased from the annals of literature. Her efforts were often in vain, but a generation later, Virginia Woolf would take up the same challenge, with much greater authority and lasting effect.
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Leonard Woolf was introduced to “Aunt Anny” in the months after his marriage to Virginia and, while noting that her genius was “a shade out of control,” took to her immediately. “I was taken to be exhibited to many of Virginia’s relations whom hitherto I had not met. The most interesting was Lady Ritchie . . . Aunt Anny, as she was always called . . . was a rare instance of the child of a man of genius inheriting some of that genius.” During World War I, when Anne Thackeray Ritchie lived almost exclusively in her house at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, she and the Woolfs saw little of one another. Both in her published essays and reviews and in person, Lady Ritchie was prone to lament how far the new generation of novelists fell below the standards of the Victorian greats such as her father, and Virginia Woolf, who had published her first novel in 1915, took those remarks personally. In 1915 Woolf suffered an extremely serious mental breakdown, from which it took her more than a year to recover, and, with travel in wartime difficult, she was unable to get to the Isle of Wight to see her dear old friend and clear the air.
Thus, when Lady Ritchie died in 1919, Virginia and Leonard were truly sad and eager to mend bridges with the Ritchie family. Both Woolfs at once published obituaries that offered thoughtful and loving tribute to the dead woman. For the Times Literary Supplement of March 6, 1919, Virginia Woolf wrote:
She will be the unacknowledged source of much that remains in men’s minds about the Victorian age. She will be the transparent medium through which we behold the dead. We shall see them lit up by her tender and radiant glow. Above all and forever she will be the companion and interpreter of her father whose spirit she has made walk among us not only because she wrote of him but because, even more wonderfully, lived in him . . . many are today turning to the thought of her, thanking her not only for her work, but thanking her more profoundly for the bountiful and magnanimous nature in which all tender and enchanting things seemed to grow—a garden one might call it where the air blew sweetly and freely and the bird of the soul raised an unpremeditated song of thanksgiving for the life that it had found so good.
Virginia Woolf’s style in this obituary, written I think under the influence of emotion, seems forced, almost like a parody of Thackeray Ritchie’s famously loose, flowing, euphuistic style. The Ritchie-Thackeray-Cornish clan disliked Virginia’s obituary and were further enraged by the portrayal of Lady Ritchie as Mrs. Hilbery in Woolf’s new novel, Night and Day, also published in 1919.
No one who knew Anne Thackeray Ritchie could fail to recognize whom Virginia Woolf had in mind when, in the opening pages of the novel, she describes the mother of her protagonist, Katharine Hilbery: “[Mrs. Hilbery’s] large blue eyes, at once sagacious and innocent, seemed to regard the world with an enormous desire that it should behave itself nobly and an entire confidence that it would do so, if it would only take the pains . . . [s]he was clearly still prepared to give everyone any number of fresh chances and the whole system the benefit of the doubt.”
Mrs. Hilbery is the daughter of Richard Alardyce, a great Victorian poet—a composite of Thackeray Ritchie’s father, William Makepeace Thackeray, and her great friend Alfred Tennyson. The novel opens at the Hilberys’ London home, which contains a small private museum devoted to the great poet’s memory. A similar shrine, devoted to her father, could be found in all the homes of Anne Thackeray Ritchie.
Night and Day is Virginia Woolf’s most conventional and least known work, essentially a highly autobiographical romance novel in which the two protagonists, Katharine Hilbery and Ralph Denham, must both choose between two suitors. A struggling barrister, Denham lives with his large, financially strapped family in Hampstead, a then benighted region of London so distant from the Hilbery world of Chelsea, Belgravia, and Kensington that, at one point, Katharine literally cannot think how to make her way home from Denham’s house. Katharine finally chooses Ralph Denham, a character based on Leonard Woolf, after he is able to convince her that he respects and values her as much as he loves her and will never force her to obey his wishes or conform to his ideas.
Katharine needs a husband because, in her late twenties, she is frittering away her life, pouring tea for her mother’s aging cronies—who include a wickedly accurate version of Henry James—showing new visitors around the shrine to the Great Alardyce, keeping track of the mounds of the poet’s personal papers heaped up in the study, and trying to make her mother commit two consecutive sentences of the biography to paper. In her letters, Virginia Woolf says that she is basing Katharine on her sister Vanessa, and clearly Woolf, in her portrayal of the Hilbery ménage, is drawing on memories not only of the Ritchie family but of the frustration and stress she and Vanessa had suffered in the last years of their father’s life at Hyde Park Gate.
A superficial reading of the opening of the novel might lead one to conclude that Katharine Hilbery is a slave to her selfish mother and to the memory of her dead grandfather. However, as the novel progresses, we see that in Mrs. Hilbery, Woolf sets out not to critique and mock Anne Thackeray Ritchie but to celebrate and immortalize a most beloved old friend and the kind of mother she herself longed for. Maggie Hilbery, herself happily married to a devoted and congenial
man, is keenly aware of her daughter’s situation and, while knowing how much she will miss her daughter when she marries, is eager for Katharine to find a life of her own. Ralph Denham meets Katharine because her mother has invited him to tea, and at the end of the novel, Mrs. Hilbery, in a move worthy of Oscar Wilde or P. G. Wodehouse, breaks the impasse between Katharine and Ralph and disposes of Katharine’s fiancé, William Rodney—a carefully heterosexualized but still recognizable version of Lytton Strachey. Even as Katharine and Ralph walk the rainy streets of London and debate the possibility of a meeting of two minds, male and female, Mrs. Hilbery, their dea ex machina, sizes up the situation, makes a decision, and acts.
Comedy is something we look for in Virginia Woolf’s letters and diary but not her novels. In Night and Day, however, where she sorts her four young characters neatly into two pairs as in a drawing room comedy, she indulges her gift for funny dialogue, as the following set of Hilberyisms illustrates:
“Mr. Fortescue [the Henry James avatar] has almost tired me out. He is so eloquent and so witty, so searching and so profound that, after a half hour or so, I feel inclined to turn off all the lights.” (page 12)
“Dear things, dear chairs and tables. How like old friends they are—faithful, silent friends. Which reminds me, Katharine, little Mr. Anning is coming tonight.” (page 12)
“I don’t know what’s come over me. I actually had to ask Augustus the name of the lady Hamlet was in love with as you were out Katharine, and Heaven knows what he mayn’t put down about me in his diary.” (page 56)
As Woolf herself recognized, her Mrs. Hilbery is the best thing in the book, and if Anne Thackeray Ritchie had lived another six months, I think she would have loved it, laughed with it, learned from it, and written to her beloved adoptive niece Virginia that perhaps the twentieth-century novel had some things going for it after all.