Ritchie, Anne Thackeray (1837–1919), daughter of British Victorian novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, aunt to Virginia Woolf, and a significant author and editor in her own right. Best known for her biographical introductions to her father's works, she also wrote several ‘domestic novels’, numerous essays on her contemporaries, and two collections of modern fairy tales. Five Old Friends and a Young Prince of 1868 (published in America as Fairy Tales for Grown Folks) and Bluebeard's Keys (1874) are Märchen in Victorian dress for adult audiences. Ritchie's versions of classic tales including ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ‘The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood’, ‘Cinderella’, and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ have been criticized as heavily moralized and pedestrian, lacking the magic of their originals. But they are always realistic in setting, revelatory of Victorian middle‐ and upper‐class manners and mores, and clever in their psychology. They are sometimes feminist in orientation. Ritchie's female protagonists, young women journeying to maturity (often aided by wise old spinsters) awake to the problems of society's foolish and superficial judgements or battle against marriages of convenience. Her villains: misers, fanatics, nouveau riche industrialists, and hard‐hearted materialists of both sexes are the ogres, monsters, and witches of traditional fairy lore transformed. Ritchie also provided a valuable introduction to The Fairy Tales of Madame d'Aulnoy in 1895.
Bibliography
- Auerbach, Nina, and Knoepflmacher, U. C. (eds.), Forbidden Journeys (1992).
- Zipes, Jack (ed.), Victorian Fairy Tales (1987).
— Carole Silver
