Memory and Legacy: A Thackeray Family Biography, 1876-1919 - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

John Aplin's two-volume biography of the Thackeray family opened with 'The Inheritance of Genius', in which the lives of William Makepeace Thackeray, his mother and his younger daughter were covered. In 'Memory and Legacy', Aplin continues to draw on a rich collection of letters, journals and other family papers, many of which have not previously been seen by Thackeray scholars, the story finally closing with the death of Annie, his elder daughter, at the end of the Great War. Throughout her adult life she would continue to feel a responsibility towards her father's memory, and not least his insistence that there should be no biography of him. Yet she found a way of paying a daughter's tribute to this major literary voice of the nineteenth century (a role affectionately fictionalised by Virginia Woolf as Mrs Hilbery in 'Night and Day'), and in her introductory essays to the Biographical Edition of his works she offered a glimpse of the materials that would eventually become available to modern scholarship. When Leslie Stephen's first wife, Minny Thackeray, died in 1875, aged thirty-five, Annie supposed that future personal happiness would elude her. But after the early days of bereavement, she drew ever closer to her intellectually precocious second cousin, Richmond Ritchie. Their marriage when Annie was aged forty and he just twenty-three raised many eyebrows, but it inaugurated a period of great fulfilment for Annie as a mother, and saw her career develop from novelist into successful memoirist. 'Memory and Legacy' examines this complex Thackeray and Ritchie cousinhood and their network of influential friends, and includes the first account of the last years of Isabella Thackeray, the novelist's widow. But at its heart lies the mercurial character of Annie, whose writing Virginia Woolf (a daughter of Leslie Stephen's second marriage) praised as 'the unacknowledged source of much that remains in men's minds about the Victorian age'. 'Memory and Legacy' can be read alone for a detailed assessment of Anne Thackeray Ritchie's middle and later years; as a sequel to The Inheritance of Genius, it concludes the most complete telling of the story of the Thackeray family circle yet published. John Aplin was formerly Head of the Department of Performing Arts at Brunel University, and is now an independent researcher and writer. He has also edited the five-volume 'Correspondence and Journals of the Thackeray Family' for Pickering & Chatto, an appropriate resource to mark the bicentenary of Thackeray's birth in 2011.

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