This is an exhaustively researched and fascinating biography of Thackeray’s daughter. But it’s also the story of her sister Minny and her husband Leslie Stephen and their tragic daughter Laura Makepeace Stephen whose instability and mental distress haunted the life of her half sister Virginia (Stephen) Woolf. It recreates their lives – often happy and joyful and then haunted by illness and money worries – wonderfully. They are young and hopeful and Leslie Stephen, often just seen as the curmudgeonly and controlling patriarch of Virginia Woolf’s writings and diaries, is portrayed particularly sympathetically. This is a family saga like few others: Anny’s surprise marriage to her much younger cousin, Minny’s awful death and Leslie’s terrible grief (ameliorated by the cool Julia Prinsep Jackson – no wonder Virginia had a problem with her), beautiful Lionel Tennyson’s disgrace and then romantic marriage and Anny’s heartbreaking understanding of the truth of her own marriage. To this is added the ghost of Thackeray, poor mad Mrs Thackeray and Anny’s thriving writing career and influence on those around her, not least Woolf herself. Laura’s story is very well drawn and affecting. Two concerns: photographs and family trees. Although this is a biography of Anny there were no photographs of her children. The family trees show Anny's children but not her son's marriage and child/children. One last minor quibble – how did clever and brave Anny make it into the Siege of Paris?