[Lady Anne Isabella]. English writer, eldest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray. She inherited literary talent from her father and wrote several charming works of fiction, notably Miss Angel (1875), and subsequently edited Thackeray’s works and published some volumes of criticism and reminiscences. She is best remembered perhaps as the author of Old Kensington (1873). Amongst her other novels were The Story of Elizabeth (1863) and The Village on the Cliff (1865). She also published various volumes of biographical essays (Madame de Sévigné, 1881, and A Book of Sibyls, 1883, etc.), and contributed a most interesting series of prefaces to the Library edition of her father’s works, thus supplying a substitute for the regular biography of him that he had always deprecated. She died at Freshwater, I. of Wight, on the 26th of February 1919. Her husband, Sir Richmond Thackeray Ritchie (1854–1912), who in 1907 was created a K.C.B., became permanent Under-Secretary of State for India in 1910, and died on the 12th of October 1912. See also “My Witch’s-Caldron” and “My Father’s Mother.”
