'But, William, see what you have done,' cried the confidant, gazing at the black enamel round the stones, 'this is a mourning ring, not an engagement ring.' It was to prove an ominously appropriate token.' The first four years of their marriage were very happy. In her biography of Thackeray, An Uneasy Victorian, Ann Monsarrat writes, 'In the course of his courtship, Thackeray had given Isabella a ring, a diamond set between two opals, which he had shown in triumph to a friend. Despite trepidation on the part of both of their families and concentrated effort on the part of Isabella's mother to end the relationship, Thackeray and Isabella were married at the British Embassy in Paris on August 20, 1836. She was the daughter of an Indian army colonel who had died and left his wife with five children. Crowe’s parties that he met Isabella.įinancially, Isabella was not much better off than Thackeray. Crowe, wife of the Paris correspondent for the Morning Chronicle.

He was a regular at the piano parties of Mrs. Still, he was having the time of his life as a Bohemian art student hanging out at the Louvre and in art studios, drinking small beer, and eating in inexpensive cafés. The rest of the inheritance he had gambled away after a short stint at Cambridge. He was poor, having lost the majority of a 17,000-pound inheritance in an Indian bank collapse. It was there he met Isabella Shawe in a Paris drawing room.Īfter a year in the employ of his grandmother, Thackeray found himself a humble bachelor pad on the rue des Beaux Arts, and managed to cobble together a meager living selling sketches to French publications. She had suckered him into the position with a small stipend and the promise he would get to be something he longed to become: a Parisian art student. In 1834, Thackeray traveled to Paris to serve as his grandmother's errand boy. For most of his career he had to 'write for his life,' as he called it, not only to support his family, but also to pay for the treatments and care required for his wife who fell into so deep a depression, she was often catatonic. Although theirs can’t be considered a marriage that was full of happiness and good times, it certainly spurred him to prolific writing. He seriously considered marrying for money, but when he met Isabella Shawe, he married for love. William Makepeace Thackeray, best known for novels like Vanity Fair and Catherine, did not make a prudent marriage. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair 'If people only made prudent marriages, what a stop to population there would be!'

William thackeray novels