Adventures of the real-life Becky Sharp
SIR – Claire Allfree (“Nasty girls grab their share of the limelight at last”, Arts, July 15), mentions Becky Sharp, of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.
One of my wife’s relations, Mrs Elliot, had lived in Calcutta with her first husband, a barrister. One day in later years, staying in Paris, she was introduced to Thackeray as someone who, while in India, had known Miss Theresa Reviss.
“Tizzie Reeves” was the illegitimate daughter of Charles Buller; her mother had been a girl in the Baker Street bazaar, and she had cut quite a swathe in India.
On one occasion she appeared at a fancy-dress ball as His Satanic Majesty, complete with sweeping tail. The gentlemen went wild over her, including the Lord Chancellor of the day who took her out on his yacht for a trip. In mid-ocean, she suddenly threw up her hands and said she was compromised. The Lord Chancellor settled on her an ornate furnished villa in Italy. Once established here, Tizzie married Count Gateschi, a Knight of the Holy Roman Empire. When the Lord Chancellor died, a legal representative was dispatched to the villa to negotiate its return.
Tizzie agreed to give up everything, then disappeared – only to turn up in London as the “Countess de la Torre”, who was always being had up by the police for not feeding her cats.
As Mrs Elliot and Thackeray sat together, he looked at her closely and said: “So, you knew Theresa Reviss. Tell me about her”. Mrs Elliot did so, then said: “Well, Mr Thackeray, I’ve told you all I know about her. Now tell me something. Did you have her in mind when you wrote the character of Becky Sharp?”
Thackeray, who had been gazing vacantly into space, suddenly turned round, looked at her, said nothing, nodded his head, got up and left. Tim Matthews
Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk