Dorothy Osborne

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Standard Name: Osborne, Dorothy
Birth Name: Dorothy Osborne
Married Name: Dorothy Temple
Titled: Dorothy, Lady Temple
DO , widely known as a writer of love-letters, has been more admired by romantics than by feminists. She can be a sharply comic and often satirical observer of social custom and individual idiosyncrasy, as well as an acute commentator on public affairs and literary topics.
Photograph of a painting of Dorothy Osborne (after her marriage, as Lady Temple) by Caspar Netscher, 1671. She is seated, with her elbow on the arm of her chair and her head resting on that hand. Against a background of figured black and gold drapery, she wears a dark gold dress with voluminous skirt and sleeves, clasped in front, with white linen at the full wrists and the neckline. She has a double string of pearls, and more pearls wrapped in her dark hair, loosely piled up hair. National Portrait Gallery

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Elizabeth Isham
Their brother, later Sir Justinian Isham (1611-75), became a royalist during the Civil War and a founder member of the Royal Society . He married in 1634, and his wife, Jane, had five babies (all...
Family and Intimate relationships Dorothy Sidney Countess of Sunderland
Her second marriage was evidently a cause for surprise, and even some disapproval (perhaps because it hinted at sexual feelings in a respectable upper-class lady in her thirties). The letter-writer Dorothy Osborne , who was...
Health Isabella Hamilton Robinson
After meeting Edward Lane , she paid many visits to receive water therapy at the hydropathic establishment he ran at Moor Park at Farnham in Surrey (once the home of seventeenth-century letter-writer Dorothy Osborne ...
Literary responses Lady Cynthia Asquith
Lord David Cecil , a literary historian and a correspondent of LCA , thought her letters just as amusing and charming and individual as those of Dorothy Osborne , Lady Sarah Lennox , Jane Welsh Carlyle , or Emily Eden .
qtd. in
Beauman, Nicola. Cynthia Asquith. Hamish Hamilton, 1987.
313
Literary responses Margaret Cavendish
The book was a sensation. Dorothy Osborne , however, believed that such public appearance in print cast doubt on Cavendish's sanity.
Grant, Douglas. Margaret the First: A Biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623-1673. Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957.
126
Literary responses Margaret Cavendish
These verse eulogies or testimonials came from distinguished persons and institutions to whom she had presented copies of her work. It circulated widely: the Dutch poet Constantijn Huygens owned one of her books.
Smith, Emma. Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book. Oxford University Press, 2016.
92
During...
Literary responses Madeleine de Scudéry
As a consequence of this work's success, MS became popularly known as Sappho or the modern Sappho, particularly in connection with her salon.
McDougall, Dorothy. Madeleine de Scudéry. Benjamin Blom, 1972.
vii, 89, 224, 226
The Grand Cyrus (often called by its...
Occupation Jonathan Swift
In the late seventeenth century Swift worked for Sir William Temple (husband of the letter-writer Dorothy Osborne ), became an ordained clergyman, and embarked on a career of political pamphleteering. He took on his first...
Publishing Katherine Philips
His paragraph of retraction in Mercurius Publicus said he was now convinced that his texts were defective and not authorised by the poet. Some scholars, notably Germaine Greer , have suspected that these statements were...
Publishing Antonia Fraser
She followed it with Love Letters: An Anthology, dedicated to Harold Pinter and published in later 1976.
Fraser, Antonia. Must You Go?. Random House of Canada, 2010.
62
Writing about this book in the Times on 6 November that year, AF noted that she...
Reception Katherine Philips
Soon after KP 's death Sir William Temple published an elegy on her, made at the Desire of My Lady Temple
qtd. in
Roberts, William, scholar. “Sir William Temple on Orinda: Neglected Publications”. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Vol.
57
, 1963, pp. 328-36.
332-3
—his wife, the former Dorothy Osborne . The progress of her reputation was...
Residence Susan Tweedsmuir
As a child Susan Grosvenor lived with her parents and sister at 30 Upper Grosvenor Street—but only in winter, for summers were spent with the extended family at her grandparents' country estate, Moor Park...
Textual Features Edna Lyall
The story revolves around Jacobite plots and persecution of Quakers in the period when Queen Mary II was Regent for her husband, William , during his absences abroad. It introduces actual characters like the former...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Osborne, Dorothy. Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, 1652-54. Editor Parker, Kenneth, Ashgate, 2001.
Osborne, Dorothy. “Early Letters. Winter and Spring 1652-53”. Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54, edited by Sir Edward Abbott Parry, Griffith, Farran, Okeden and Welsh, 1888.
Giffard, Martha, Lady et al. “Editorial Materials”. Martha Lady Giffard, Her Life and Correspondence (1664-1722), edited by Julia G. Longe and Julia G. Longe, George Allen and Sons, 1911, p. various pages.
Osborne, Dorothy. “Introduction”. The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple, edited by G. C. Moore Smith, Clarendon Press, 1928, p. ix - li.
Osborne, Dorothy. Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54. Editor Parry, Sir Edward Abbott, Griffith, Farran, Okeden and Welsh, 1888.
Osborne, Dorothy. The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple. Editor Smith, G. C. Moore, Clarendon Press, 1928.