The Inheritance of Genius

Volume I of a biographical study of the author William Makepeace Thackeray and his family, including new research shedding light on the lives of his daughters.

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 in the world. 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 extensively 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 first biography of the Thackeray family circle since that of Gordon Ray in 1958, Aplin's two-part study incorporates significant new documentary evidence, some of it never previously seen by Thackeray scholars, and includes the fullest and frankest examination of the lives of Thackeray's two daughters yet published.

Illustrated with portraits, group photographs, and original sketches by the Thackerays, this book is a wholly new reappraisal of Thackeray's life, writing, and legacy through the lens that truly defined him - his family. It will appeal not just to those interested in Thackeray and the Victorians, but also to readers of biography, women's studies and memoirs, and to followers of Viriginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

Formerly Head of the Department of Performing Arts at Brunel University, since 2001 John Aplin has pursued independent and extensive research on the Thackeray family. In 2006 he published A True Affection: Anne Thackeray Ritchie and the Tennysons. The Inheritance of Genius will be followed by a second volume Memory and Legacy, and both are due for publication in 2010 by The Lutterworth Press.