by Jane Dunn
Wright, Jane 151, 165, 213
Wroth, Lady Mary 133–4 and note
Urania 133
Yelverton, Henry 170–1
Youghal 225
P.S. IDEAS, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES …
About the Author
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A Romeo and Juliet for the Seventeenth Century
Life at a Glance
A Writing Life
About the Book
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Growing Up in the Seventeenth Century: The Insiders’ View
If You Loved This, You Might Like …
Read On
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Have You Read?
About the Author
A Romeo and Juliet for the Seventeenth Century
Jane Dunn talks to Sarah O’Reilly
Read My Heart is set in seventeenth-century England. Did you come across anything that really surprised you about this time period while you were doing research for this book?
The Tudors and the Georgians, thanks to Jane Austen, have long swaggered and pouted picturesquely across our cinema and TV screens and dominated our school history books. The period sandwiched between them, however, has had less attention and yet in many ways is even more filled with interest and drama. The seventeenth century is a century of revolution: a fascinating period that embraced civil war and republicanism, experiments in radical thought, huge social and political upheavals and a flowering of scientific discovery and intellectual freedom. The continually surprising realisation is how advanced the phlegmatic British were as radicals and revolutionaries – we actually cut off the head of our king, whose authority it was widely believed flowed directly from God, in an act of reckless courage that had traumatic and liberating effects on every facet of society. And this 150 years before the proudly defiant French got round to their Revolution.
So one of the joys of writing this book was to explore an epoch that changed Britain and its monarchy for ever through the personal experiences of two attractive, interesting and eloquent individuals. History from the point of view of those who lived it is always more affecting than the impersonal sweep of the centuries. Although it all begins as a personal love story, a Romeo and Juliet for the seventeenth century, Dorothy and William became influential actors on the biggest stage of all.
Can you tell me a little about the process of finding your subjects? And is it always as serendipitous as it sounds from your preface to Read My Heart?
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‘History from the point of view of those who lived it is always more affecting than the impersonal sweep of the centuries.’
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I had always been aware that in the field of English letters there were some extraordinarily early examples written by a woman called Dorothy Osborne. Then when I was on holiday in Cornwall, thinking about what book to write after Elizabeth and Mary, my husband came back from Padstow with a second-hand edition of Dorothy’s letters. I began to read, and her character, William’s responses and the times in which they lived sprang so vividly from the page that I immediately knew here was a wonderful story to tell, a story never properly told before. Unusually I had two really attractive and interesting correspondents to write about, both equally eloquent and important in the love affair and in their subsequent public life together.
But the process of finding a subject is rarely so straightforward. Finding a subject is a bit like finding a husband, but one that not only pleases you but seduces your agent too – and then convinces a hard-nosed publisher of his global appeal! You have to find a character or characters who interest you enough to live with in close proximity for three or four years, remaining an intimate part of your consciousness for the rest of your life. If this isn’t hard enough, this attractive subject has to be in need of biographical discovery, overlooked by every other writer in search of an idea, and waiting just for you.
What sort of relationship grows between a biographer and her subject? Is it possible to remain detached from the lives of those you write about?
Working for years, particularly when it involves reading every word written by your subject, thinking about this character, these events, knowing more about the life than even the closest members of his or her own family may have known, all this makes for a peculiar kind of intimacy where you know so much – but also realise you know so little. It is sensual information that is lacking: what someone really looks like, smells and talks like, what kind of physical presence they have in a room, their tics and gestures, how they laugh and what makes them cry.
The biographer has great power and therefore a real responsibility to be true to the material, as well as the humility to accept that anyone can only ever grasp a part of the story of another’s life. We know from our own experiences that there are many versions of our own selves, of our lives, and we would be uneasy if a stranger decided to recreate a character for us and, in publishing, make that construct immortal, unchanging and somehow true. A biographer’s subject, if dead, has no opportunity to respond, no chance of restoring a reputation that might have been lightly destroyed in a writer’s desire for sensation and increased sales.
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‘I find family relationships endlessly fascinating and rewarding both in art and life.’
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From Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell to the queens Elizabeth and Mary, you’ve proven yourself to be an expert in writing about the dynamics of couples. Where does your interest in such relationships spring from?
I find family relationships endlessly fascinating and rewarding both in art and life. The sisterly bond is particularly interesting to me as a relationship of passion, potential rivalry and lifelong intimacy. Yet it’s very little examined by writers.
I am the eldest of six sisters and two brothers, very close in age and affection, and this has made me sympathetic to the various dynamics in familial relationships. I think allowing the intense sisterhood between Virginia and Vanessa to be central to their lives helped illuminate their characters and the complexity of their reactions to each other and to the world.
The pleasure I had in writing that book drew me to the relationship between Elizabeth and Mary. Although they were cousins who never met, they were sister queens in an overwhelmingly masculine world where their natural solidarity was distorted into deadly rivalry by circumstance, ambition and fear.
As a biographer and historian you’ve ranged over a number of periods in your work, from the Elizabethan to the early twentieth century. If the past is another country, how do you prepare to travel back in time to inhabit the world of your subjects?
By reading as many of the letters, memoirs and diaries of the time in which individual voices full of thoughts, emotions and experiences can be heard clearly. I have only ever written about people who have left behind a good chunk of their own words as I think the best biographies are alive with the character and distinctive voice of the subject, rather than the relentless tone of the author.
My way into Elizabeth I’s character was through her writing, which gave me an irresistible view of her as a thinking, feeling woman, not merely a political and executive queen. Mary Queen of Scots also expressed herself distinctively in copious letters, poems and aggressive embroidery! Of course with Dorothy Osborne and William Temple we have her strikingly individual voice in every letter she wrote, and William’s lively essays, later letters and memoirs provide the answering voice that helped me connect with their characters and thoughts and the dynamic of their relationship.
Etiquette books can also be a surprising eye-opener as to how young men and women of the gentry and upper classes were expected to conduct themselves. The music that characters listened to and possibly played helps too with the imaginative leap into other worlds, as does visiting the buildings they lived in (if they still exist), walking in their footsteps and gazing out on the landscapes they described.
You have been to Dorothy’s childhood home of Chicksands, and you’ve also seen her letters and some of her
embroidery in person. What was it like to stand where she stood nearly 350 years after her?
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‘I have only ever written about people who have left behind a good chunk of their own words as I think the best biographies are alive with the character and distinctive voice of the subject.’
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Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire is a marvel of antiquity and endurance. It was already ancient and semi-ruined when Dorothy was born there in 1627. Built in the twelfth century as a Gilbertine religious house for both monks and nuns living in separate cloisters, it existed productively until 1538 and Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. By the time Dorothy knew Chicksands, only the nuns’ cloister remained habitable and it is here that she lived and wrote the immortal letters to William. Standing today within its cool stone walls, walking where Dorothy walked, looking out on the view she described of the River Flit beyond the house, it is almost possible to hear the hooves of the postboy’s horse, bringing a longed-for letter from William and returning to London with one of Dorothy’s clandestine love letters to him. It is a building still powerfully connected to its past.
It’s been said that letters are never meant solely for an audience of one. Despite Dorothy’s protestations to the contrary, as her biographer do you believe that she might have written them with the belief that they might one day find an audience beyond their addressee, William?
I’m certain Dorothy’s letters were written with William alone as her focus. In their enforced separation, letters were her only means of seduction, the way she kept this passionate young man-about-town close and faithful to her during a difficult, clandestine courtship of more than six years. In her lonely exile in the country, drained by care for her increasingly infirm father and bored to tears by the small talk of visiting neighbours, this clever young woman poured all her passion and intellectual energy into her letters, knowing William would read them with as much hunger as she did his, and expecting that he would burn them, as they had agreed they would, to escape detection.
William told her she wrote the best letters he had ever read and certainly Dorothy took pride and pleasure in her writing. However, for a woman to be published in her own right was thought scandalous and this, together with Dorothy’s often expressed horror of drawing attention to herself, makes me sure that, as she dashed off these letters to William, freighted with such emotion and significance, they were always meant for him alone. This sense of their part in a continuous and private conversation explains their spontaneity and emotional frankness, the gossip, flirtatiousness and humour that would have been much less evident if she had become self-conscious and aware of a wider audience.
Some researchers get positively feverish at the sight of dusty letters or a crumpled diary from the storeroom of an archive. Can you describe the effect that seeing Dorothy’s letters had on you?
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‘William told her she wrote the best letters he had ever read and certainly Dorothy took pride and pleasure in her writing.’
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Dorothy’s letters are objects of fascination and beauty, hugely expressive of her character and the circumstances in which she wrote them. The thrill is in handling something that was so important to them both, held in their hands and closely read by them more than 350 years ago. Dorothy’s letters are written mostly on large sheets of paper folded in half, using all four sides. Her handwriting is elegant and free-flowing, harmoniously laid out on the page and still remarkably clear and legible despite the passing centuries. The first letter she sends William, after a worrying period of silence, is as careful and neat in its execution as in its wording, and looks like a fair copy after one or two earlier versions were abandoned. In subsequent letters, when she is sure of his continued love, her hand relaxes into much bigger and freely looped letters. It’s quite clear looking at the extant letters that Dorothy’s enquiring mind gets carried away with the flight of ideas or is determined to finish a story she’s relating and her writing gets smaller and smaller and starts spreading into the margins, even invading the white space at the top of the first side where she had begun her letter by saluting William with her customary ‘Sir’.
The words she crossed out and those she chose as replacements, the pressure of the pen, the smudges and layout, all reveal thought processes and emotional tension, lost in any published edition. The original documents, be they letters or journals, carry so much extra information for the scholar and biographer, but mostly they offer a direct emotional connection with your subject and the past, as the centuries that separate you melt away.
There are so many wonderful characters with walk-on parts in your narrative, often explained in footnotes. Could you nominate a few of your favourites?
I’m particularly drawn to Magdalen Herbert, a remarkable woman highly regarded for her intelligence who married Dorothy’s most glamorous uncle, the ‘regicide’ and aesthete Sir John Danvers. He was barely twenty and so beautiful, John Aubrey tells us, that people would stop to gaze at him in the street, whereas she was a widow twice his age with ten surviving children. Against all expectation, it was a great love match that lasted until her death. She was notable for being the friend and patron of the matchless poet and preacher John Donne, who celebrated her life in print, and she was also the mother of George Herbert, the much loved metaphysical poet and divine.
Amongst the hundreds of others, all with their individual fascinations, I have to mention the remarkable family of Huygens. Sir Constantijn Huygens had been a leading Dutch intellectual, poet and composer; his son Constantijn junior was an artist and art connoisseur and Latinist poet, while his other son, Christiaan, was a brilliant scientist and a member of the prestigious British Royal Society. The younger Constantijn had become a friend of William Temple’s while he was in Holland and had brought to William’s attention the oriental practice of treating gout (an excruciating condition that plagued William and most other middle-aged men of the time) with moxibustion – burning a small pyramid of herbs on the affected joint. This so impressed William that he wrote an essay entitled ‘The Treatment of Gout by Moxibustion’.
When Dorothy’s letters were first published for a Victorian audience, she became a minor literary celebrity. Why don’t more people know about her today?
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‘Dorothy’s letters offer a remarkably fresh view of the life and character of a feisty, intellectually curious and engaging young woman of this time.’
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Few women’s voices call to us from the mid-seventeenth century and Dorothy’s letters offer a remarkably fresh view of the life and character of a feisty, intellectually curious and engaging young woman of this time. The fact she was living out a love story of timeless appeal, with all the necessary alarms and excursions, and then at last the longed-for consummation, catches the imagination. Dorothy’s letters are still valued today in academic literary studies, but as examples of early epistolary art. I think their invisibility today to most of the general reading public is partly because there is much more interest in contemporary writing; fewer people choose to read the fiction of previous centuries and even fewer turn to the kind of essays and letters that were a staple of a well-stocked Victorian library. I hope my book brings to a new readership the ageless appeal of Dorothy’s extraordinary letters and the story of her and William’s life lived out against the backdrop of a revolutionary age.
LIFE at a Glance
BORN
Durban, South Africa, the first of eight children
EDUCATED
Bentley Grammar School, Calne, Wiltshire; Clifton High School, Bristol; University College London – BA Philosophy
CAREER TO DATE
Author of Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley; Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy, Antonia White: A Life; Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens and Read My Heart: Dorothy Osborne and Sir William Temple, a Love Story in the Age of Revolution
FAMILY
&nbs
p; son, the publisher Benjamin Dunn; daughter, the novelist Lily Dunn; married for a second time to the linguist and writer Nicholas Ostler
LIVES
in Bath
A Writing Life
When do you write?
In a most haphazard way, easily distracted by family, friends, pets and life in general. Most usually I try and write from the afternoon into the night when somehow concentration and insight seem to increase with the darkness. But then as deadlines approach and pass I take to desperate measures and write from breakfast to midnight day after day, until I collapse with some kind of implosive illness that sends me to bed for a week.
Where do you write?
In one of the most beautiful rooms in a semi-derelict Georgian villa. It’s on the first floor with a set of three pairs of full-length French windows in a row with a balcony and views out over the Limpley Stoke valley. And it’s ruined by the mess of my desk, the bulging bookshelves behind me and the boxes of papers and books stacked on the floor. There is an old French campaign bed where the whippets and sometimes my husband, the writer Nicholas Ostler, come and join me. On the walls there are riotous paintings by my mother and a Victorian copy of the famous miniature of Mary Queen of Scots (made to look far sexier than the original) to remind me of her irresistible charms while I wrote Elizabeth and Mary.