Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2004 by Diana Robin

Marie le Jars de Gournay. Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works.

Eds. Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pbk. xxviii 176 pp. index. bibl. $17. ISBN: 0-226-30556-2.

Dorothy Osborne. Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, 1652-54: Observations on Love, Literature, Politics and Religion.

Ed. Kenneth Parker. The Early Modern Englishwoman, 1500-1750: Contemporary Editions. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002. xii 348 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. $84.95. ISBN: 0-7546-0382-2.

Juan Luis Vives. The Instruction of a Christen Woman.

Eds. Virgina Walcott Beauchamp, Elizabeth H. Hageman, and Margaret Mikesell. Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. cxviii 274 pp. index. append. illus. gloss. bibl. $39.95. ISBN: 0-252-02677-2.

Each of these new scholarly editions contributes to the growing body of published primary sources by and about European women and their status in the Renaissance. As the evidentiary base for studies in the field gains mass and breadth, the time has come to stress diversity and divergence among women writers over the formulation of more generalities about what has been called "the female voice" in early modern Europe.

Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, 1652-54, the letters of the noblewoman Dorothy Osborne (1627-95) to her lover and eventual husband Sir William Temple (1628-99), certainly the most baroque of the three editions, for me had the most revelations. Patricia Meyer Spacks, for example, finds in the epistolary voices of Osborne's later compatriots Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Delany, and Elizabeth Carter an "ideology of self-subordination," and "denied self-esteem, and repressed sexuality" ("Female Rhetorics," in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock [1988], 181, 189). Osborne presents herself as the opposite of such women: she is explicitly self-confident, consistently assertive, never coy but always clear about her desire for William.

While Osborne has hardly been a canonical figure among early modern English women writers, she is by no means unknown. In the last hundred years nine editions of her letters have gone to press, counting Sir Edward Parry's early pioneering editions (1888, 1906, 1914), two editions pirated from Parry (one in London, the other in Toronto), G. G. Moore Smith's Clarendon Press edition (Oxford 1928), the Penguin Classics paperback produced by Kenneth Parker in 1987, and now the edition under review of Parker's work by Ashgate. Woven throughout the letters are references, always oblique (though fully fleshed out in Parker's new fifty-four-page introduction to the work and the annotations to each letter), to the precarious financial and political circumstances of two royalist families, the Osbornes and the Temples, during the English Revolution, 1640-60, and Cromwell's rule as the Lord Protector of England, 1653-58. Parker's new Ashgate volume is a revised version of the Penguin edition with vastly expanded appendices, commentary, notes, and a scholarly introduction situating the work within current feminist theories of the female writer, though he mistakenly insists that Osborne's letters were never intended for publication. Letters, as Denise Riley observes, quoting Emily Dickinson and Derrida, are always written to be seen, before and beyond the grave (The World of Selves [2000], 63-64).

A hundred years prior to Richardson's epistolary novel Clarissa, Dorothy Osborne's letters to William Temple describe a situation uncannily like the one Clarissa bemoans to her friend Miss Howe. Osborne's father and brothers repeatedly try to push her into marriage with men who would offer an advantageous alliance to the family but whom Osborne herself finds repugnant. In the Osborne-Temple letters, however, there are no parental figures, and no Aunt Hervey, strong enough to override Osborne's own powerful character. Unlike Clarissa, Osborne does not sneak off with her lover. She faces her father and brother down. But was it the norm for women of her class to display so little affection--as is the case throughout her letters--for either her mother or father, whom she nursed until his death?

In an age in which noblewomen were sold off by their fathers and brothers like horses or oriental rugs, her passionate ideas about marriage are radically contrarian. In Letter 44 (144-46), a treasure trove of reflections on matrimony, Osborne proposes that couples should first live together for a trial year before deciding whether to marry. Love, the cornerstone of marriage for Osborne, depends on both passionate attachment and true friendship.

Osborne's action to settle her own marriage contract reveals a will of iron. In letter after letter, Dorothy has told William baldly that he means everything to her. But as negotiations proceed, with her father deceased and only her uncle and brother Henry to represent her, she makes it perfectly clear to William that if his father refuses to accept Henry as a party to the marriage treaty and such cash and property as she brings to the table, all marriage plans are off and that will be that. It must have been heartbreaking to Osborne that in the several months prior to the conclusion of the marriage settlement, William's father wrote not a single line of welcome to her.