‘The Transparent Medium’: Anny Thackeray Ritchie

Abstract

Until her death in 1919, Ritchie functioned as an embodied link between Woolf and her forebears. Woolf, in her obituary, claims that Ritchie was ‘the unacknowledged source’ of information about the Victorian age and ‘the transparent medium through which we behold the dead’ (E3: 18). Woolf also claims that ‘Young writers might do worse than go to Lady Ritchie’s pages for an example of the power of an apparently simple and yet inevitably right sense of the use of language’ (14–15). It is clear that Woolf did go to Ritchie’s pages but Ritchie is an almost entirely ‘unacknowledged source’. Ritchie’s obituary is one of the few exceptions when Woolf does write openly about her (13–20), but employing the same ambivalence which characterises Night and Day. She claims to admire her sincerely but the validity of her tribute is undercut as she privately admits to doubting the sincerity of her own emotions and ‘dressing it up a trifle rosily, in the Times tomorrow’ (D1: 247–8).