Dorothy Osborne

...Sir William Temple became a noted British diplomat—noted enough that a writer named Thomas Peregrine Courtenay composed one of those hefty Victorian biographies of him in 1838...

...I forgot all my disguise, and we talked ourselves weary...

...Indeed, in one letter she scoffs at the literary ambitions of Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle: "Sure, the poor woman is a little distracted, she could never be so ridiculous else as to venture at writing books, and in verse too...

...Courtenay's Life of Sir William Temple had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the brilliant historian, journalist, and polemicist Lord Macaulay, who tore it to shreds in the pages of the Edinburgh Review...

...At last, in a pitiful tone, "Sister," says he, "I have heard you say that when anything troubles you, of all things you apprehend going to bed, because there it increases upon you, and you lie at the mercy of all your sad thoughts, which the silence and darkness of the night adds a horror to...

...Indeed it is only because of the fame her eventual husband later achieved that her work came to light at all...

...She invariably refers to him as "the Emperor Justinian" and describes her encounters with him in diplomatic terms: Would you think it, that I have an ambassador from the Emperor Justinian that comes to renew the treaty...

...you shall take your choice of my four daughters...

...Here's a characteristic passage from a letter written in the summer of 1653: My brother says not a word of you, nor your service, nor do I expect he should...

...BY ALAN JACOBS In recent years, "neglected women writers" have been much in vogue, with publishers bringing out series after series of them...

...Many of the writers published in, for example, the distinguished and scholarly Oxford Women Writers series have exemplified a kind of proto-feminism, but Osborne seems to have had little in common with these authors...

...If I should not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that...

...Talbot, I should not be less gallant...

...Indeed, Virginia Woolf acknowledged Osborne as one of this company...

...She was one of the great—and greatly neglected —chroniclers of the human comedy...

...but one above all the rest I think he is in love with himself, and may marry him too if he pleases, I shall not hinder him...

...if I could forget you, he would not help my memory...

...We only wish there were twice as many...

...Tis one Talbot, the finest gentleman he has seen this seven year...

...The Osbornes, who were short of cash at the time, could scarcely afford to stand on ideological principle...

...They met in 1645, in the midst of England's Civil War, with fathers on opposite sides: Sir John Temple supported Oliver Cromwell and served in the Long Parliament, while Sir Peter Os-borne, lieutenant governor of the island of Guernsey, so passionately loved King Charles that he was the last Royalist leader to surrender, yielding Castle Cornet to Parliamentarian forces only when his men were starving...

...You would laugh, sure, if I could tell you how many servants [suitors] he has offered me since he came down...

...He asked my pardon and I his, and he has promised me never to speak of it to me whilst he lives, but leave the event to God Almighty...

...The tribulations of the courtship were not over even with this...

...Familial opposition prolonged the courtship for about eight years, though neither Dorothy nor William seems to have wavered in commitment...

...So why hasn't the energetic industry devoted to the recovery of women writers rediscovered Dorothy Osborne...

...Those who would like a fuller encounter with her work must scour the secondhand bookstores (there's a Penguin edition from 1987, although it's in original spelling and punctuation...

...but the mischief on't is he has not above fifteen or sixteen hundred pound a year, though he swears he begins to think one might bate £500 a year for such a husband...

...The next day I, not being at dinner, saw him not till night...

...In earnest, 'tis true, and I want your counsel extremely, what to do in it...

...If I could do so too, there were no dispute in't...

...Alan Jacobs is professor of English at Wheaton College and author of A Visit to Vanity Fair: Moral Essays on the Present Age (Brazos...

...Macaulay's enthusiasm in turn intrigued a certain Edward Abbott Parry, who tracked down the whole cache of letters and published an edition of them...

...Dorothy's brother Henry seems to have been especially eager for the match, although he would have preferred any number of suitors to Temple, of whom he said (as Dorothy wrote to her beloved), "that religion or honor were things that you did not consider at all, and that he was confident you would take any engagement, serve in any employment, or do anything to advance yourself...

...He] sat half-an-hour and said not one word, nor I to him...

...William's love survived this last trial, and they were married at Christmas 1654...

...To say you were a beggar, your father not worth £4000 in the whole world, was nothing in comparison of having no religion nor no honor...

...After all the "servants" had been sent away and the families (however imperfectly) reconciled to the match, Dorothy contracted smallpox, which left her face disfigured by scars, her beauty gone...

...Henry's condemnation of Temple prompted a break between brother and sister, and Dorothy's description of their reconciliation is one of the great moments of seventeenth-century prose: I had not patience for this...

...In addition to poor Talbot we find, in the same letter, an appearance by one of the recurrent characters in the epistolary saga: Sir Justinian Isham, a widower with five children (four of them daughters) who seems to have had a reputation for piety but whom Dorothy thinks "the vainest, impertinent, self-conceited learned coxcomb that ever yet I saw...

...Even after the war's conclusion, neither family was pleased by the prospect of Dorothy and William's union...

...Yet Dorothy Osborne, the most remarkable of that company, has been overlooked by literary archaeologists—and it is a scandal that her work is not more widely available...

...then he came into my chamber, where I supped but he did not...

...More significant is Osborne's lack of interest in feminist issues...

...You told me once that of all my servants you liked him the best...

...rather, a worthy real-life predecessor to the Jane Austen heroines whom many feminist critics have embraced...

...but I doubted the first extremely...

...Think Jane Austen, a hundred and fifty years earli-er—although Osborne may be even wittier...

...Indeed, for those many difficult and uncertain years when she and Temple were separated, wit must have been her chief tool for emotional survival...

...The story of William Temple and Dorothy Osborne is worthy of enshrinement in a romance movie...

...Osborne, who lived from 1627 to 1695, never imagined her work would be published, in part because it consists solely of letters to her fiance, and in part because she did not think authorship a fit role for a woman...

...Two hermits conversing in a cell they equally inhabit, never expressed more humble, charitable kindness, one towards another, than we...

...The letters of Dorothy's that survive (none of William's does) cover the courtship's last two years...

...I am at that pass now...

...and if I were as much taken [as he] with Mr...

...Part of the problem, perhaps, is that she wrote only letters...

...I tell him I am glad to hear it...

...Dorothy's death parted them forty-one years later...

...But one aspect appealed to Macaulay: the Appendix, in which Courtenay had placed some of the letters written by Dorothy Osborne before her marriage to Temple...

...We] fell into a discourse of melancholy and the causes, and from that (I know not how) into religion...

...Still, in her resistance to her family and her confident banter with her lover, she seems anything but a doormat...

...As vividly and movingly as Osborne can describe the dark nights of her soul, she always retains a healthy distance from even her deepest fears: The great constant in her prose is the wit that enables her to see the humor and absurdity of our affairs...

...and we talked so long of it, and so devoutly, that it [allayed] all our anger...

...We grew to a calm and peace with all the world...

...and till he sees it done, he will be always the same to me that he is...

...then he shall leave me, he says, not out of want of kindness to me, but because he cannot see the ruin of a person that he loves so passionately, and in whose happiness he had laid up all his...

...No, there is no justifiable reason for neglecting Dorothy Osborne, one of the English language's masters of the epistolary art...

...Osborne excels at such banter, but in the most remarkable of her letters, the power comes from an extraordinary moment of Christian reconciliation...

...Well, I'll think on't, and if it succeed I will be as good as my word...

...These are the terms we are at, and I am confident he will keep his word with me, so that you have no reason to fear him in any respect...

...I vow to God I would not endure another night like the last to gain a crown...

...he renounced me again, and I defied him, but both in as civil language as it would permit, and parted in great anger with the usual ceremony of a leg and a courtesy, that you would have died with laughing to have seen us...

...yet for much of the history of English literature, the letter has been considered one of the standard genres, and its most skilled practitioners (Horace Walpole, Mary Wortley Montague) praised as literary lions...

...Dorothy was beset by a flock of suitors (by all accounts she was a beauty), the most noteworthy of whom was Henry Cromwell, son of that dreadful rebel who would soon become Lord Protector of England...

...The seeker will find a writer of remarkable grace, with a range of emotional delineation that few can match...

...Courtenay expresses some doubt whether his readers will think him justified in inserting so large a number of these epistles," Macaulay declared...