Her father wrote Vanity Fair; she became the aunt of Virginia Woolf. In her multitude of friendships, Lady Ritchie was a link between the great Victorians of her father's era and such modern phenomena as the Bloomsbury group. Her use of impressionistic detail and concern for capturing moments of consciousness anticipate Woolf's own work. After an unconventional marriage, Anne Ritchie combined a literary career and a fully attentive maternal role with a success few of her sister writers enjoyed.

Anne Isabella ("Anny") Thackeray was born in London and spent the first few years of her life in Bloomsbury. Shortly after the birth of her sister, Harriet Marion ("Minny"), their mother, Isabella, began to exhibit signs of the mental illness which finally forced her to live apart from her family until her death in 1894. The girls stayed with their paternal grandmother in Paris for several years while William Makepeace...