Toilers and Spinsters and Other Essays.
THACKERY, Miss [Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie].
Toilers and Spinsters and Other Essays.
First Edition of Toilers and Spinsters and Other Essays
London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1874.
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Item Number: 3005
First edition of this work by Thackeray. Octavo, bound in three quarters leather over marbled boards, marbled endpapers, top edges gilt. In very good condition.
Toilers and Spinsters and Other Essays (Smith, Elder and Co., 1874) is a collection of social and literary essays by Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919), the eldest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray and a writer, memoirist, and essayist whose prolific literary career across more than twenty books has gained increasing scholarly recognition as a significant body of Victorian women's writing in its own right. The title essay originated as a contribution to the Cornhill Magazine in 1861, the celebrated journal founded and initially edited by her father, and examines with characteristic sympathy and perspicacity the limited professional and social options available to educated women in mid-Victorian England, engaging with the same questions of female independence and economic constraint that animated the broader Victorian debate about women's work and social position. Ritchie brought to these essays the firsthand knowledge of a woman who had grown up at the heart of the Victorian literary world, knew George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Charles Dickens personally, and wrote from within a social and intellectual circle whose attitudes toward women's roles she both shared and quietly interrogated.
