First published in 1994, these two volumes are intended as a supplement to the four-volume edition edited by Gordon N. Ray in 1945-46. In writing to his broad range of correspondents, Thackeray produced a varied body of letters that will help readers to better understand his nineteenth-century society as well as his professional and private life — especially his relationships with women. These volumes contain 1713 letters: 1464 to and from Thackeray that were not included in the earlier volumes, and 249 with texts that have been edited from newly available manuscripts, and that thereby replace texts that were printed in Ray from incomplete sources.

This is a domestic biography of the Thackeray family, placing the writer in the context of his home life. The story continues long after his death, to trace the later lives of his two daughters, Anne Isabella and Harriet Marian, and their marriages.His elder daughter Annie, in particular, took responsibility for guarding and shaping her father's legacy. The source material is not Thackeray's books so much as his own more intimate papers - his letters - and the correspondence and journals of his mother and daughters. The book will appeal not just to those interested in Thackeray and the Victorians, but to the general reader of biography, to those interested in womenis studies, life writing and to followers of the family of Virginia Woolf.

Marking the bicentenary of the birth of William Makepeace Thackeray in 1811, this five-volume set presents a collection of materials relating to the novelist and to his gifted family.

This book, the first of two volumes anticipating the bicentenary of the birth of William Makepeace Thackeray in 1811, details not only the author's life, but also the cosmopolitan and literary worlds inhabited by his two daughters, Minny and Annie. When Thackeray died in 1863, the two sisters were forced to find their own way forward. Minny would marry Leslie Stephen, later father of Virginia Woolf, and die at only thirty-five; Annie, encouraged in early years by her father, would herself emerge as a successful novelist, though one always living, albeit willingly, within her father's shadow. Drawing continuously on the letters, diaries, journals and notebooks of the Thackerays and their circle, Aplin sheds light on this remarkable man's family, and the effect that his life, death and legacy had on those closest to him. The book will appeal not just to those interested in Thackeray and the Victorians, but also to readers of biography, womenis studies and memoirs, and to followers of Viriginia Woolf and Bloomsbury.

These letters have been selected according to their ability to convey the essential biographical developments of a very interesting life, and their ability to represent highly characteristic verbal and pictorial expressions of a great man of letters. In spite of his struggles, Thackeray articulates in his letters an exhuberance characteristic of one of the great enjoyers of life. Seventy five of his comical illustrations accompany the texts of these letters.