The social and moral structures of men’s and women’s lives were based on the teaching and traditions of Christian religion and to a lesser extent the philosophy of the classical authors of Greece and Rome. The Church’s view of women was well established and deeply embedded in society’s expectations of human behaviour. The Bible provided the authority. It was read daily and studied closely, making depressing reading for any young woman seeking a view of herself in the larger world. In the Old Testament woman was a mere afterthought of creation. Apart from rare and shining examples, like the wise judge Deborah and the beneficent Queen of Sheba, they had little significance beyond being subjects in marriage and mothers of men. When it reared its head at all, female energy was more often than not duplicitous, contaminatory and dark.
The poet Anne Finch,* of a younger generation than Dorothy, still smarted under the limited expectations for girls, comparing the current generation unfavourably to the paragon Deborah:
A Woman here, leads fainting Israel on,
She fights, she wins, she tryumphs with a song,
devout, Majestick, for the subject fitt,
And far above her arms [military might], exalts her witt,
Then, to the peacefull, shady Palm withdraws,
And rules the rescu’d Nation with her Laws.
How are we fal’n, fal’n by mistaken rules?
Debarr’d from all improve-ments of the mind,
And to be dull, expected and dessigned;
… For groves of Lawrell [worldly triumphs], thou wert
never meant;
Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content.19
A thoughtful girl’s reading of the classics in search of images of female creativity or autonomy was almost as unedifying. Unless they were iconic queens such as the incomparable Cleopatra, women of antiquity were subject to even more containment than their seventeenth-century English counterparts. The main role of Greek and Roman women was as bearers of legitimate children and so their sexuality was monitored and feared. Women had to be tamed, instructed and watched. Traditionally they were expected to be silent and invisible, content to live in the shadows, their virtues of a passive and domestic kind.
Dorothy had certainly grown up unquestioning in her belief in God and duty to her parents, expecting to obey them without demur, particularly in the crucial matter of whom she would marry, and wary of drawing any attention to herself. There was more than an echo down the centuries of the classical Greek ideal: that a woman’s name should not be mentioned in public unless she was dead, or of ill repute, where ‘glory for a woman was defined in Thucydides’s funeral speech of Pericles as “not to be spoken of in praise or blame”’.20 The necessity of self-effacement and public invisibility was accepted by women generally, regardless of their intellectual or political backgrounds. The radical republican Lucy Hutchinson, brought up by doting parents to believe she was marked out for pre-eminence, insisted – even as she hoped for publication of her own translation of Lucretius – that a woman’s ‘more becoming virtue is silence’.21
The Duchess of Newcastle was another near contemporary of Dorothy’s but she was one of the rare women of her age who refused to accept such constraints on her sex. Her larger than life persona, however, and her effrontery in publishing her poems and opinions with such abandon attracted violent verbal assaults on her character and sanity. The cavalier poet Richard Lovelace* inserted into a satire, on republican literary patronage, a particularly harsh attack on the temerity of women writers, possibly aimed specifically at the duchess herself, whose verses were published three years prior to this poem’s composition:
… behold basely deposed men,
Justled from the Prerog’tive of their Bed,
Whilst wives are per’wig’d with their husbands head.
Each snatched the male quill from his faint hand
And must both nobler write and understand,
He to her fury the soft plume doth bow,
O Pen, nere truely justly slit till now!
Now as her self a Poem she doth dresse,
Ands curls a Line as she would so a tresse;
Powders a Sonnet as she does her hair,
Then prostitutes them both to publick Aire.22
It was no surprise that even someone as courageous and individual as the Duchess of Newcastle should show some trepidation at breaking this taboo, addressing the female readers of her first book of poems published in 1653 with these words: ‘Condemn me not as a dishonour of your sex, for setting forth this work; for it is harmless and free from all dishonesty; I will not say from vanity, for that is so natural to our sex as it were unnatural not to be so.’23
As a young woman, Dorothy Osborne was intrigued by the duchess’s celebrity, a little in awe of her courage even, for Dorothy too had a love and talent for writing, owned strong opinions and was acutely perceptive of human character. Eager as she was to read the newly published poems (this was the first book of English poems to be deliberately published by a woman under her own name), Dorothy recoiled from the exposure to scorn and ridicule that such behaviour in a woman attracted. And she joined the general chorus of disapproval: ‘there are many soberer People in Bedlam,’24 she declared. Perhaps the harshness of this comment had something to do with the subconscious desire of an avid reader and natural writer who could not even allow herself to dream that she could share her talents with an audience of more than one?
Writing in the next generation, Anne Finch, who did publish her poems late in her life, knew full well the way such presumption was viewed:
Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,
Such an intruder on the rights of men,
Such a presumptuous Creature, is esteem’d,
The fault, can by no vertue be redeem’d.
They tell us, we mistake our sex and way;
Good breeding, fassion, dancing, dressing, play
Are the accomplishments we shou’d desire;
To write, or read, or think, or to enquire
Wou’d cloud our beauty, and exaust our time;
And interrupt the Conquests of our prime;
Whilst the dull mannage, of a servile house
Is held by some, our utmost art, and use.25
Secluded in the countryside, Dorothy cared for her ailing father, endured the social rituals of her neighbours and read volume upon volume of French romances. The highlight of her days and the only, but fundamental, defiance of her fate was her secret correspondence with William Temple. In this Dorothy engaged in the creative project of her life, one that absorbed her thoughts and called forth every emotion. Through their letters they created a subversive world in which they could explore each other’s ideas and feelings, indulge in dreams of a future together and exorcise their fears. Dorothy’s pleasure in