ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, some of the unusual aspects of Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s childhood were touched on. Born in 1837, the year of Victoria’s coronation, Anny (as her family called her) had lost her mother by 1840. After her mother’s mental collapse, she and her sister were raised in Paris by a loving but religiously infl exible paternal grandmother and, subsequently, in London by a no less loving but liberally inclined father. Ritchie coped admirably with various hardships throughout her long life. She died in 1919, the year after the Armistice that ended the Great War, a critically admired and commercially successful writer.
