An Audience of One: Dorothy Osborne's Letters to Sir William Temple, 1652–1654 (review)

Kenneth Parker's fine editions of Dorothy Osborne's correspondence (1987 and 2002) have spawned a cottage industry of scholarship on this once-unknown seventeenth-century English writer. Anne Finnell, Susan M. Fitzmaurice, Carrie Hintz, Lyn L. Irvine, Genie Lerch-Davis, and Sheila Ottway have recently published studies of Osborne's collected letters to William Temple, the man she would later marry. Among these, Hintz's An Audience of One: Dorothy Osborne's Letters to Sir William Temple, 1652–1654 is of particular interest not only because it represents the first book-length study of the writer subsequent to Parker's 2002 edition of the letters, but because it contributes to the current discussion of the place of "private" letters — works not earmarked for print or manuscript circulation — in the literary canon.

Focusing on the issue of intention, Hintz has built her argument around what she terms the essential privateness of Osborne's letters. Making the point repeatedly that Osborne's letters to William Temple were meant for his eyes alone, Hintz warns the reader against comparing fictional letters such as those in Richardson's Clarissa to Osborne's "real-world" letters "since they are not a retrospectively crafted form" (15). But how useful is such a distinction? My own view is that letters are always written for an audience beyond the addressee, and, like other writings, they are indeed are retrospectively and prospectively crafted.

Hintz draws attention in each of the five chapters in An Audience of One to what she views as the self-consciously private world Osborne crafts, shapes, and constructs — words she often uses in describing Osborne's style. At the opening of chapter 1, "Dorothy Osborne's Courtship," Hintz provides a sketch of the life of this daughter of Royalist gentry during the Civil War in England, who on her father's death in 1654 was forced to vacate the family estate where she was born and raised, and to move into her brother-in-law's household. Chapter 1 concerns Osborne's fashioning in her letters not of a self-portrait but rather one of the couple. While Hintz views Osborne as attempting to define what marriage could and should be in her correspondence with Temple, she cautions against reading her as a protofeminist or a believer in gender parity: "She both condemned women's inequality and affirmed its necessity" (32). Chapter 2, "An Audience of One: Dorothy as a Letter Writer," lays out the functions Osborne's letters performed: they were acts of rebellion against her family (both families opposed the marriage), they served as gifts for her absent lover, and they were substitutes for face-to-face conversation. But more importantly, the letters enabled Osborne not only to represent herself as a model wife but to develop a prospectus, again in dialogue with Temple, of an ideal marriage. The third and richest of the chapters to my mind, "Shared Privacies: Reading in the Osborne-Temple Courtship," treats Osborne's readings and use of French romances to form a shared ethos and sense of emotional and moral solidarity with her lover, who himself was a writer of romances. The couple's joint readings of Gomberville, Scudéry, and Calprenède provided them with plenty of models and anti-models for their own courtship, thereby developing what Hintz calls a "readerly privacy" (85). In chapter 4, "Imagining the Couple: Triangularity and Surveillance," Hintz observes that Osborne portrays certain characters — such as her servingwoman Jane Wright's and her brother Henry Osborne — as threats to the couple's privacy in order to strengthen the couple's perception of their relationship as a safe haven in the face of a hostile world.

The final chapter, "Illness and Emotional Attachment in Osborne's Letters," provides Hintz with a further springboard for her thesis. Osborne transforms even her illnesses into a locus for...