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A Memoir of Jane Austen. AUSTEN-LEIGH (James Edward).
GIFTED BY ANNE RITCHIE TO MINNA DUCKWORTH - THE STEP-AUNTS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF
A Memoir of Jane Austen By her Nephew, To Which is Added Lady Susan and Fragments of Two Other Unfinished Tales by Miss Austen.
Frontispiece portrait of Jane Austen with tissue guard.
Third edition. 8vo. [194 x 130 x 30 mm]. [i], x, 364 pp. Bound in publisher's original green cloth, the boards blocked in blind floral patterns, the spine lettered in gilt, brown endleaves. (Head and foot of spine and corners bumped, text a little loose in the binding but holding).
London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1872
Minimal foxing throughout the book, otherwise internally clean. Two ownership inscriptions on the front endleaf belonging to 'Richmond Ritchie' and 'Minna Duckworth'. Two further inscriptions on the front flyleaf reading: "Minna Duckworth from Anne Ritchie, April 29 1875" and "Hester Smith from her father H.Y.L. Smith, May 1935".
A Memoir of Jane Austen was first published in 1870. Although James Edward Austen-Leigh was named as the sole author, there was considerable input from many of Jane Austen's relatives. Austen-Leigh described his "dear Aunt Jane" as someone who was uninterested in fame and who only wrote in her spare time. However, the manuscripts appended to the second edition suggest that Jane Austen was intensely interested in revising her manuscripts and was perhaps less content than Austen-Leigh described her. The memoir does not attempt to unreservedly tell the story of Jane Austen's life, and following the Victorian conventions of biography, it kept much private information from the public. The second edition was published in 1871 and included some of Austen's previously unpublished works.
David Gilson includes Austen-Leigh's work in A Bibliography of Jane Austen (M130). He makes note that Anne Isabella Thackeray was among those who made a review of the memoir in Cornhill Magazine 24 (1871). Anne writes: "So we gladly welcome one more glimpse of an old friend come back with a last greeting. All those who love her name and her work, will prize this addition, small as it is, to their acquaintance with her. Lady Susan is a short story complete in itself. It is very unlike her later works in many respects, and scarcely equal to them, but the Watsons is a delightful fragment, which might belong to any of her other histories. It is bright with talk and character and animation. It is a story which is not Emma, and which is not Pride and Prejudice, but something between the two, and which was written - so the preface tells us - some years before either was published".
Anne Isabella Ritchie, or Lady Ritchie (1837-1919), the eldest surviving daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), was a highly regarded writer in the late Victorian literary scene. Her father is noted as being highly devoted to his daughters and as the editor of the Cornhill Magazine, he aided her by putting into print her first piece of journalism - 'Little Scholars'. She is noted as the custodian of her father's literary legacy and many of her works received immediate success. It was Anne who, in her 1885 novel Mrs. Dymond, introduced into English the proverb, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and feed him for life". In 1877 Anne married her cousin Richmond Thackeray Willoughby Ritchie (1854-1912), who was by this point seventeen years her junior and still an undergraduate at Cambridge. George Eliot described the match as "one of the several instances that I know of lately, showing that young men of even brilliant advantages will often choose as their life's companion a woman whose attractions are wholly of spiritual order" (Ritchie, 171). Through her father and her own publications, Anne became a considerably well connected woman. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes her as "one of the great ornaments of early twentieth-century literary life. She was the friend of Henry James, Stevenson had written her a poem and George Eliot had declared that with the partial exception of Trollope she was the only modern novelist she cared to read".
The recipient of this book, Minna Duckworth, was distantly related to Anne Ritchie. Minna was the sister of Herbert Duckworth (1833-1870) who married Julia Jackson and had three children; George Herbert, Gerald (who founded Duckworth Books) and Stella Duckworth. On Herbert's death Julia remarried the author Leslie Stephen and had another four children; Thoby, Adrian and of course, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Leslie Stephen was previously married and had a daughter with Harriet Marian Thackeray, the sister of Anne Ritchie. This makes both Minna and Anne step-aunts to Virginia Woolf. The ODNB records that upon Anne's death "among her obituaries, one of the most evocative is that contributed to the Times Literary Supplement by her step-niece Virginia Woolf (who also drew her as Mrs Hillberry in Night and Day)".
Stock no. ebc8728
GIFTED BY ANNE RITCHIE TO MINNA DUCKWORTH - THE STEP-AUNTS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF
A Memoir of Jane Austen By her Nephew, To Which is Added Lady Susan and Fragments of Two Other Unfinished Tales by Miss Austen.
Frontispiece portrait of Jane Austen with tissue guard.
Third edition. 8vo. [194 x 130 x 30 mm]. [i], x, 364 pp. Bound in publisher's original green cloth, the boards blocked in blind floral patterns, the spine lettered in gilt, brown endleaves. (Head and foot of spine and corners bumped, text a little loose in the binding but holding).
London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1872
Minimal foxing throughout the book, otherwise internally clean. Two ownership inscriptions on the front endleaf belonging to 'Richmond Ritchie' and 'Minna Duckworth'. Two further inscriptions on the front flyleaf reading: "Minna Duckworth from Anne Ritchie, April 29 1875" and "Hester Smith from her father H.Y.L. Smith, May 1935".
A Memoir of Jane Austen was first published in 1870. Although James Edward Austen-Leigh was named as the sole author, there was considerable input from many of Jane Austen's relatives. Austen-Leigh described his "dear Aunt Jane" as someone who was uninterested in fame and who only wrote in her spare time. However, the manuscripts appended to the second edition suggest that Jane Austen was intensely interested in revising her manuscripts and was perhaps less content than Austen-Leigh described her. The memoir does not attempt to unreservedly tell the story of Jane Austen's life, and following the Victorian conventions of biography, it kept much private information from the public. The second edition was published in 1871 and included some of Austen's previously unpublished works.
David Gilson includes Austen-Leigh's work in A Bibliography of Jane Austen (M130). He makes note that Anne Isabella Thackeray was among those who made a review of the memoir in Cornhill Magazine 24 (1871). Anne writes: "So we gladly welcome one more glimpse of an old friend come back with a last greeting. All those who love her name and her work, will prize this addition, small as it is, to their acquaintance with her. Lady Susan is a short story complete in itself. It is very unlike her later works in many respects, and scarcely equal to them, but the Watsons is a delightful fragment, which might belong to any of her other histories. It is bright with talk and character and animation. It is a story which is not Emma, and which is not Pride and Prejudice, but something between the two, and which was written - so the preface tells us - some years before either was published".
Anne Isabella Ritchie, or Lady Ritchie (1837-1919), the eldest surviving daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), was a highly regarded writer in the late Victorian literary scene. Her father is noted as being highly devoted to his daughters and as the editor of the Cornhill Magazine, he aided her by putting into print her first piece of journalism - 'Little Scholars'. She is noted as the custodian of her father's literary legacy and many of her works received immediate success. It was Anne who, in her 1885 novel Mrs. Dymond, introduced into English the proverb, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and feed him for life". In 1877 Anne married her cousin Richmond Thackeray Willoughby Ritchie (1854-1912), who was by this point seventeen years her junior and still an undergraduate at Cambridge. George Eliot described the match as "one of the several instances that I know of lately, showing that young men of even brilliant advantages will often choose as their life's companion a woman whose attractions are wholly of spiritual order" (Ritchie, 171). Through her father and her own publications, Anne became a considerably well connected woman. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes her as "one of the great ornaments of early twentieth-century literary life. She was the friend of Henry James, Stevenson had written her a poem and George Eliot had declared that with the partial exception of Trollope she was the only modern novelist she cared to read".
The recipient of this book, Minna Duckworth, was distantly related to Anne Ritchie. Minna was the sister of Herbert Duckworth (1833-1870) who married Julia Jackson and had three children; George Herbert, Gerald (who founded Duckworth Books) and Stella Duckworth. On Herbert's death Julia remarried the author Leslie Stephen and had another four children; Thoby, Adrian and of course, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Leslie Stephen was previously married and had a daughter with Harriet Marian Thackeray, the sister of Anne Ritchie. This makes both Minna and Anne step-aunts to Virginia Woolf. The ODNB records that upon Anne's death "among her obituaries, one of the most evocative is that contributed to the Times Literary Supplement by her step-niece Virginia Woolf (who also drew her as Mrs Hillberry in Night and Day)".
Stock no. ebc8728
GIFTED BY ANNE RITCHIE TO MINNA DUCKWORTH - THE STEP-AUNTS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF
A Memoir of Jane Austen By her Nephew, To Which is Added Lady Susan and Fragments of Two Other Unfinished Tales by Miss Austen.
Frontispiece portrait of Jane Austen with tissue guard.
Third edition. 8vo. [194 x 130 x 30 mm]. [i], x, 364 pp. Bound in publisher's original green cloth, the boards blocked in blind floral patterns, the spine lettered in gilt, brown endleaves. (Head and foot of spine and corners bumped, text a little loose in the binding but holding).
London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1872
Minimal foxing throughout the book, otherwise internally clean. Two ownership inscriptions on the front endleaf belonging to 'Richmond Ritchie' and 'Minna Duckworth'. Two further inscriptions on the front flyleaf reading: "Minna Duckworth from Anne Ritchie, April 29 1875" and "Hester Smith from her father H.Y.L. Smith, May 1935".
A Memoir of Jane Austen was first published in 1870. Although James Edward Austen-Leigh was named as the sole author, there was considerable input from many of Jane Austen's relatives. Austen-Leigh described his "dear Aunt Jane" as someone who was uninterested in fame and who only wrote in her spare time. However, the manuscripts appended to the second edition suggest that Jane Austen was intensely interested in revising her manuscripts and was perhaps less content than Austen-Leigh described her. The memoir does not attempt to unreservedly tell the story of Jane Austen's life, and following the Victorian conventions of biography, it kept much private information from the public. The second edition was published in 1871 and included some of Austen's previously unpublished works.
David Gilson includes Austen-Leigh's work in A Bibliography of Jane Austen (M130). He makes note that Anne Isabella Thackeray was among those who made a review of the memoir in Cornhill Magazine 24 (1871). Anne writes: "So we gladly welcome one more glimpse of an old friend come back with a last greeting. All those who love her name and her work, will prize this addition, small as it is, to their acquaintance with her. Lady Susan is a short story complete in itself. It is very unlike her later works in many respects, and scarcely equal to them, but the Watsons is a delightful fragment, which might belong to any of her other histories. It is bright with talk and character and animation. It is a story which is not Emma, and which is not Pride and Prejudice, but something between the two, and which was written - so the preface tells us - some years before either was published".
Anne Isabella Ritchie, or Lady Ritchie (1837-1919), the eldest surviving daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), was a highly regarded writer in the late Victorian literary scene. Her father is noted as being highly devoted to his daughters and as the editor of the Cornhill Magazine, he aided her by putting into print her first piece of journalism - 'Little Scholars'. She is noted as the custodian of her father's literary legacy and many of her works received immediate success. It was Anne who, in her 1885 novel Mrs. Dymond, introduced into English the proverb, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and feed him for life". In 1877 Anne married her cousin Richmond Thackeray Willoughby Ritchie (1854-1912), who was by this point seventeen years her junior and still an undergraduate at Cambridge. George Eliot described the match as "one of the several instances that I know of lately, showing that young men of even brilliant advantages will often choose as their life's companion a woman whose attractions are wholly of spiritual order" (Ritchie, 171). Through her father and her own publications, Anne became a considerably well connected woman. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes her as "one of the great ornaments of early twentieth-century literary life. She was the friend of Henry James, Stevenson had written her a poem and George Eliot had declared that with the partial exception of Trollope she was the only modern novelist she cared to read".
The recipient of this book, Minna Duckworth, was distantly related to Anne Ritchie. Minna was the sister of Herbert Duckworth (1833-1870) who married Julia Jackson and had three children; George Herbert, Gerald (who founded Duckworth Books) and Stella Duckworth. On Herbert's death Julia remarried the author Leslie Stephen and had another four children; Thoby, Adrian and of course, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Leslie Stephen was previously married and had a daughter with Harriet Marian Thackeray, the sister of Anne Ritchie. This makes both Minna and Anne step-aunts to Virginia Woolf. The ODNB records that upon Anne's death "among her obituaries, one of the most evocative is that contributed to the Times Literary Supplement by her step-niece Virginia Woolf (who also drew her as Mrs Hillberry in Night and Day)".
Stock no. ebc8728