‘Young writers might do worse’: Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Virginia Stephen and Virginia Woolf

Abstract

As Virginia Woolf notes in “The Leaning Tower”, education ‘play[s] a very important part in a writer’s work’ (CE2, p. 168). She expresses astonishment at ‘how little stress has been laid upon the writer’s education’ and notes how writers ‘cannot throw away their education’ because it has been ‘stamped upon them indelibly’ (CE2, pp. 169, 172). Woolf might agree, then, that the young Virginia Stephen’s home education had some influence over the writer she became. Leslie and Julia Stephen, other teachers, such as her brother, Thoby Stephen, George Warr, Clara Pater and Janet Case, along with indirect educators such as the London Library, Tit-Bits and her youthful reading, all made their mark.¹ Two aunts, Caroline Emelia Stephen and Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, were also important teachers in Virginia Stephen’s life — both were direct and practical in the face of tragedy, resisted Leslie’s manipulative tyranny, lived independent lives and, perhaps most important, were writers. Caroline Emelia Stephen’s main influence came later in Virginia Stephen’s apprenticeship, which Jane Marcus details in “The Niece of a Nun”. During Virginia’s earlier home schooling, Anne Thackeray Ritchie was frequently at 22 Hyde Park Gate as a friend to both Leslie and Julia Stephen. The sister of Leslie’s first wife, Minny, and close to Julia Duckworth long before Leslie married her (she had first met Julia Jackson through Julia Margaret Cameron), ‘Aunt Anny’ was William Makepeace Thackeray’s daughter, a successful novelist in her own right, and interestingly enough, living out a life whose pattern Virginia Stephen’s would come to resemble: a father’s tutelage and favour, the loss of a mother, mental instability in the family, a late marriage.