Author: Barbara Wright
Date: 2024
Publisher: Onslow Square
ISBN: 979-8-9904036-1-1
Quote: "William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair...died unexpectedly on Christmas Eve."
It was 1863. He was survived by two daughters and a certifiably insane wife, and, because he had never remarried, his funeral was gate-crashed by a crowd of prostitutes. Wright tells us that it had become customary for women not to attend funerals so that they wouldn't find out that kind of thing about their fathers and husbands...
What was wrong with Mrs. Thackeray? There's little overlap between psychiatric diagnoses of the 1860s and those in use today. Wright characterizes her in terms that suggest the tired old "Brilliant creative people are susceptible to ballooning-brain autistic disorders" theory. (Brilliant creative people are the ones who learn to work around autistic-type disorders, and other disabilities. There's a correlation between intelligence and becoming famous as having worked through or around disabilities, not one between intelligence and having disabilities.) Mrs. Thackeray was certified on the basis of things like throwing herself and dragging her children into deep water where they nearly drowned, tearing out her own hair and her children's. She was also Irish; she may have had the really rather rare combination of genes that seems to allow classic schizophrenia to develop. In any case, Wright clearly concluded after studying the evidence, Mrs. Thackeray was genuinely dangerous to herself and others, not one of the women (and Irish people) who were declared insane merely because they were inconvenient to someone.
Wright thinks William Makepeace Thackeray honestly loved his wife and daughters.
Wright suggests that Anny and Minny Thackeray worried about having inherited "insanity" from their mother, and, since they hadn't done that, about having passed it on to Minny's daughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen.
What was wrong with Laura Stephen? Wright characterizes her as a classic case of autism, just functional enough that it must have broken her aunt's heart when Laura grew big enough to be dangerous and had to be put in an institution. In historical fact, Anny's mother and niece lived quite a long time in the institutions where they were kept, and Anny visited them whenever she could, though she wasn't always sure they knew.
The title of Anny in Love may seem ironic while you're reading the book. In a period where upper-middle-class women weren't supposed to cultivate any marketable job skills or do any kind of paid work, Anny was a writer just like her Papa. (Only not, so far as anyone has yet tried to claim, anywhere near as good.) She wasn't rich, beautiful, or sentimental. Young men left her alone. In the 1840s and 1850s "fat" was not automatically heard as meaning "ugly" or "repulsive." Thackeray called Anny fat, presumably in contrast to her sister Minny as being thin, but in their case Minny was skinny and tubercular. Anny was sturdy and strong; the scant evidence available indicates that she was ordinary-looking, but not obese.
Portrait of Anne Thackeray Ritchie from Wikipedia.
Minny married first. Anny was the unmarried aunt who took care of sickly Minny and the one of her babies that survived, brain-damaged Laura Makepeace Stephen (no, not Stephens). Anny lived "in love" of her family with never a suitor in sight until she was old enough to create a scandal by marrying a much younger man--a relative of hers, at that. If she "fell in love" with him, as may have been the case, she concealed it well. She knew how to say no when she wanted to, so, Wright seems to conclude, when she said yes she must have meant it.
Anyway, because the Thackerays and most of their friends were literary types, they left enough details of their lives to make an enjoyable fact-based novel. When Wright describes the characters exchanging witticisms at a party, she's likely to be quoting the ones noted in their letters, diaries, or even published work. The result is fun to read and seems reasonably accurate.
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