When Vanity Fair author William Thackeray dies without a will, his young adult daughter Anny is forced to support her sister and their mad mother in a Victorian world unfriendly to female talent and ambition. Anny develops a crush on Leslie Stephen, the future father of Virginia Woolf, but it is the prettier sister Minny who steals his heart. After their marriage, Anny finds solace on the Isle of Wight among her father's famous, eccentric friends: the poet Alfred Tennyson, Lewis Carroll, the painter G.F. Watts and his child bride, and the avant-garde, bohemian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

Based on Anne Thackeray's diaries and letters, Anny in Love is a fictionalized account of a fiercely independent, quirky young woman who is irrepressibly herself. Anny's struggles as a daughter, sister, and novelist, along with her poignant love affair with a man seventeen years younger, reveal themes as relevant today as they were in the nineteenth century: sibling rivalry, the tension between female beauty and intellect, forging an identity in the shadow of a famous parent, and the complexity of desire.

The book includes a gallery of photographs of the historical characters portrayed in the novel, taken by one of the most important photographers of the nineteenth century, Julia Margaret Cameron, also a character in this novel.