Virginia Woolf’s Female Heritage: The Legacy of Anny Thackeray Ritchie, Woolf’s “Transparent Medium”

Virginia Woolf holds an unassailable place in twentieth-century literary modernism. What has been insufficiently acknowledged, not least by Woolf herself, is the profound influence of legacies from her nineteenth-century extended family which helped to shape her as a writing woman. Highly significant are the lines of descent from Anny Thackeray Ritchie. I consider Woolf’s inheritance from Ritchie in part, given our location, by exploring their shared connections with Yorkshire. I suggest that Woolf’s response to Ritchie, and to her past in general, is characterised by ambivalence and paradox. Woolf resolves her conflicting cycles of affiliation and rejection by figuring Ritchie as a ‘transparent medium’, in liminal space, obscured but always present.