true romance: william temple & dorothea osbourne--part 2

the wait is over

it’s been like 2 months since part 1. i havent been wanting to write part 2 because i was planning on citing extensively & i really don’t actually want to do that. can you put up with a purely vibes based read on this? you’re going to have to

i have not always found myself being the biggest fan of contemporary literature. especially when it “should” be relateable it often has this artificial, foreign feeling—never more so than when the characters are supposed to be extremely online

i don’t want to obscure the differences between the 17th c & today, but dorothea osbourne, & the image of william temple that kind of emerges from her letters to him, feel more fresh & real & recognizably “like us” than any of the characters in recent popular extremely-online novels, like eg (here the writer descends into a coughing fit which prevents her from having to say anything bad about an author whose novel could have been better but whom she greatly respects)

william writes dorothea charming poems & stories (i’ve mentioned his letters themselves aren’t preseved, but these are). dorothea adorably bullies him into reading long french romances (i’m picturing a kind of kdrama vibe here) so that she has someone to talk to about them. they gossip about other people’s courtships & marriages & hash out their surprisingly modern idea of what a good marriage means—& her very modern-feeling fear of marriage. she flits from politics to perfume. dorothea keeps him up to date on her stream of suitors, ridiculing them enough that he knows that he comes first, but clearly hoping to light a little fire under him as well. she ridicules everyone & everything, including him, & shares her own almost pathological aversion to being ridiculed herself. it’s a joy just to know that back in the 1600s, two people could like each other so much.

maybe it’s just the necessity of conducting their secret courtship by letters that makes me think they’re like us. they had to do the same kind of identity construction that feels like such a new problem. and maybe the problem felt new & modern to them too—in virginia woolf’s essay about dorothea osbourne (which is great reading but which also has some aspects that annoy me), there’s the phrase “the art of letter-writing in its infancy.”

but “necessity” in that last paragraph was kind of a strong word. people don’t spend seven years flirting by letters unless they are cursed with poster mindset.

i have to say it surprises me very much that this seven year epistolary courtship actually ended in a happy, stable, & fertile marriage. normally when people have seven year relationships where they barely see each other, i assume that they want to have a seven year relationship where they barely see each other. but that’s not how it worked out. he even buckled down & got a fucking job (as a diplomat, which especially at the time was a terrible & expensive job, but still).

i wonder, a little cruelly, if her battle with smallpox just before the wedding is what kept them together. maybe if she had been well the momentum for everything would have fizzled out. but it’s a lot harder to not marry your woman when she’s spent seven years on you & has just gotten facial disfigurements that could easily impede her from ever making another match. (she did look a lot better after a while btw).

dorothea has this perfect anon egirl moment that i HAVE to describe to you. on a whirlwind visit to london, she is taken night after night to the spring garden, which jane dunn tells us in her book was the “first alfresco entertainment in London” (160), an exciting & slightly scandalous public place where classes & sexes mixed. dorothea wore a mask there, rather than have any random stranger see her face.¹ but despite (or because of) her mask, passersby eavesdropped on her, admired how she spoke, & knew she must be dorothea osbourne.

there’s a common sort of feminist reading of dorothea (jane dunn & virginia woolf both seem to stand by it) that makes me a little itchy—that it’s a shame that dorothea only wrote letters instead of more serious literature, that it’s a shame she never published in her lifetime, that it’s a shame her marriage to william made it unnecessary for her to write more of her sparkling, witty letters to him. the funny thing about this reading is that william would agree with it much more than dorothea would. he’s always urging her to be less bound by convention; we know this because she is always turning him down. she is the one who viciously makes fun of women who overstep themselves & give in to literary ambition. & he was wistful during their long marriage for the beautiful letters of their courtship. which is exactly what i would have expected. ime a man in love is usually more eager for his woman to unbind herself from girl code than she is.

& the marriage seems to have been really good for them—william was so millenial-ly directionless during their courtship that i was nervous for dorothea; i didn’t realize until reading woolf’s essay that dorothea was much the same.² but, brought together, they worked hard & cannily in a shared diplomatic career that brought both of them acclaim & respect.

also i just fully disagree with the idea that it would have been better for dorothea to publish her stuff in her lifetime. dorothea had it made. if someone told me that a century after my death, my little texts & emails & dms would be discovered, edited & collated by scholars who were obsessed with me & then published to wide acclaim, i would not post shit on here. that is absolutely the dream. posting stuff, publically, for strangers to see, absolutely sucks! it’s only a painful tool meant to get what dorothea got without having to post

1. apparently that was a pretty normal option socially at that point? some people saw it as a protection of feminine modesty, some as a trick women used to get away with shit; surely it was both

2. “Of the womanly virtues that befitted her age she shows little trace. She says nothing of sewing or baking. She was a little indolent by temperament.”