Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  Why do you write?

  For the huge thrill of the research and the sense of achievement and pleasure in creating from it something new and truthful that I hope is illuminating of character, place and time – and with some of the narrative drive of fiction.

  * * *

  ‘When I’m writing about very different times from our own it helps enormously to listen to the kind of music that my characters would have played or heard themsleves.’

  * * *

  Pen or computer?

  Pencil first, on ruled paper, then computer, then pen for rewrites, additions and corrections.

  Silence or music?

  Usually silence but when I’m writing about very different times from our own it helps enormously to listen to the kind of music that my characters would have played or heard themselves. There was so much more domestic music-making in previous centuries; nearly everyone sang or played instruments as entertainment in country houses, cottages, churches and taverns.

  How do you start a book?

  I try and start with a defining moment and then work back and forward from that point. But my starting point can change as the writing and thinking progresses.

  And finish?

  I usually finish with death and a great sigh of relief – and then add a short coda about anything interesting that followed.

  Which writer has had the greatest influence on your work?

  Biography has had such a wonderful flowering during my writing life and I am grateful to all biographers past and present who have helped me understand the craft better. More personally, I think Michael Holroyd, as a writer and generous encourager of other writers, has been a beacon for me; and Richard Holmes, another really fine biographer, made me believe I could do it when he kindly reviewed my first rather callow book, a life of Mary Shelley.

  What are your guilty reading pleasures?

  Rediscovering what it was about Georgette Heyer that so gripped my imagination and fired my heart when I was a girl and devoured all her novels, reading by torchlight after lights out.

  About the Book

  Growing Up in the Seventeenth Century: the Insiders’ View

  Jane Dunn

  One of the real pleasures of my background research for Read My Heart was discovering the contemporary advice and etiquette books, written as how-to guides for young people entering the complex political and emotional terrain of the adult world. With all the benefit of experience, the writers revealed what it was like to live as a member of the privileged classes in the seventeenth century and, with directness and candour, just how young men and women were expected to behave. There were two I used particularly for their conversational immediacy of style and striking insights into Dorothy and William’s world.

  The first was an immensely popular guide for young men written by Dorothy’s uncle Francis Osborne and called Advice to a Son. This was published in Oxford in 1656, aimed directly at his niece’s and her lover’s generation, and was so successful it went to five editions in two years. Distinguished by a ban by the vice-chancellor of the university, who was concerned that it encouraged atheism, the book was a powerful polemic reflecting and seeking to influence the conduct of young men (and women, where their lives intersected). Its tone was cynical, frank and pragmatic – ringing at times with thrilling rhetoric – and hopeful young men-about-town like Pepys, and later James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, found it impressive.

  Written soon after the civil wars, with society in flux and danger and opportunity everywhere, Osborne is ambitious for his son to get on in this new world. Very much like Machiavelli, whose masterpiece The Prince offered a template for successful rulers, Osborne shows the route to material success for less exalted sons. Ever pragmatic, Dorothy’s uncle urged his young, testosterone-fuelled readers that in this uncertain world they should forget heroics and hang on to their lives: ‘A living Dog is better than a dead Lion, a quick Evasion cannot but be deemed more man-like, than a buried Valour.’

  He is wise on the snares of celebrity and his advice could as usefully be doled out to all young wannabes today:

  Be not therefore lickerish after Fame, found by experience to carry a trumpet, that doth for the most part Congregate more Enemies than Friends. If you duly consider the inconstancy of Common Applause, and how many have had their Fame broken upon the same wheel that raised it, you would be as little elevated with the smiles as dejected by the frowns of this gaudy Goddess, formed like [Botticelli’s] Venus, out of no more solid matter than the Foam of the People, found by experience to have poisoned more than ever she cured.

  The mercenary nature of marriage among the upper classes of the time is compellingly brought home to the modern reader in Osborne’s rhetorical prose:

  * * *

  ‘The best of husbands are Servants, but he that takes a Wife wanting Money is a slave to his affection, doing the Drudgeries without wages. Therefore the Yoke of Marriage had need be lined with the richest Stuff, and softest outward convenience. Else it will gall your Neck and Heart, so as you shall take little comfort in the Virtue, Beauty, Birth etc. of her to whom you are coupled.’

  * * *

  As a result of this insistence – that financial considerations alone matter – his most powerful language describes the horrors that await a young man lured by beauty or lust (rather than good business sense) into marriage:

  ‘The best of husbands are Servants, but he that takes a Wife wanting Money is a slave to his affection, doing the Drudgeries without wages.’

  Those Virtues, Graces and reciprocal Desires, bewitched Affection expected to meet and enjoy, Fruition and Experience will find absent, and nothing left but a painted Box, which Children and time will empty of delight; leaving Diseases behind, or, at best, incurable Antiquity.

  The expectations on men and women were sharply delineated, largely based on teachings of the Church articulated in a guide, A Godly Form of Household Government: for the Ordering of Private Families, According to the Direction of God’s Word, and it had been thus for centuries:

  The duty of the husband is to get goods; and of the wife, to gather them together and save them. The duty of the husband is to travel abroad to seek a living; and the wife’s duty is to keep the house. The duty of the husband is to get money and provision; and of the wife’s, not vainly to spend it. The duty of the husband is to deal with many men; and of the wife’s to talk with few. The duty of the husband is to be intermeddling; and of the wife, to be solitary and withdrawn. The duty of the man is to be skillful in talk; and of the wife, to boast of silence. The duty of the husband is to be a giver, and of the wife, to be a saver. The duty of the man is to apparel himself as he may; and of the woman, as it becometh her. The duty of the husband is to be lord of all; and of the wife, to give account of all … The house wherein these [precepts] are neglected, we may term it a hell.

  This really was a pattern that was accepted as God’s will and part of His ordering of the universe that one meddled with at one’s own (and society’s) peril. It is this traditional status quo that, remarkably, Dorothy resisted and William abdicated in support of her vision of a relationship of equals.

  * * *

  ‘Even the kind and moderate Lord Savile found female laughter so rebarbative that he declared “few things are more offensive”.’

  * * *

  An affectionate book of advice, Worldly Counsel to a Daughter, written by the tolerant and intellectual Lord Savile, seeks to support a young woman’s coming to terms with the unfairness of the situation inherent in this imbalance of power, terrified as he is of any rocking of this particular boat.

  He charged women with moral responsibility for the behaviour of both themselves and any man with whom they dealt. He suggested that every girl be careful not to be over-friendly as that could be misinterpreted by an eager male, or be the cause of bitchiness and slander from jealous women: ‘therefore, nothing is with more care to be avoided than such a kind of civility as may be mistaken for
invitation’. A young woman’s conduct had to be lacking in impetuosity and candour: a sense of humour was also a danger (here Dorothy would have failed the test of womanliness); gravity of demeanour at all times was desirable as smiling too much made you look imbecilic (‘fools always being painted in that posture’) and even the kind and moderate Lord Savile found female laughter so rebarbative that he declared ‘few things are more offensive’.

  These guides uniquely offer vivid and truthful pictures of the way lives were lived in a time far removed from our own. They were immensely helpful to me in appreciating just how revolutionary Dorothy’s aspirations were, even as she remained a dutiful and godly daughter, attempting to live within the constraints of her sex and class. But I was also surprised by the realisation as I read that there are echoes of some of these archaic views still resonating in the air today, ghosts of prejudice and expectation that men and women struggle against, even though intellectually the inequalities have long been argued away.

  If You Loved This, You Might Like…

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  by Adrian Tinniswood

  A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More

  by John Guy

  The English Civil War: A People’s History

  by Diane Purkiss

  Cromwell, Our Chief of Men

  by Antonia Fraser

  King Charles II

  by Antonia Fraser

  Read On

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  Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens

  A fascinating double biography exploring the fateful relationship between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. It was the defining relationship of their lives and marked the intersection of the great Tudor and Stuart dynasties. At its core were their rival claims to the throne of England.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I WANT TO thank the staff of the British Library, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Hartland Library at Southampton University and the library at Trinity College Dublin, the General State Archives at The Hague, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery of Ireland and the Museum of County Carlow. The London Library with its generous loan facilities continues to be a wonderful resource for all writers and researchers. For suggestions, access to and reproductions of portraits and illustrations I am most grateful to Sir Richard Osborn Bart, Mrs Sarah Saunders-Davies, Lord and Lady Brabourne, Robert Morgan-Williams, Surrey History Centre and the National Portrait Gallery.

  Many have helped bring this book to life: my husband Nicholas Ostler for drawing my attention to Dorothy’s letters and putting up so cheerfully with the aftermath, and my agent Derek Johns of A.P. Watt for encouragement and plain talk. My publishers HarperPress in the UK, Knopf in the USA and HarperCollins Canada have offered the best combination of enthusiasm, inspiration and boundless patience. Thanks indeed to Arabella Pike, Carol Janeway, Iris Tupholme, Helen Ellis, Annabel Wright, Lauren LeBlanc, Gail Lynch, Morag Lyall, and Richard Bravery who came up with a wonderful jacket design for the UK edition.

  For help, hospitality and encouragement of various kinds my thanks go particularly to Sir Stanley and Lady Odell, Brigadier Duncan of Chicksands, Sandy Maguire at Broadlands, Alison Brisby at Castle Howard, Sheila Murphy, Tseard and Nynke de Graaf, Dr Peter Shephard, Beryl Hislop, Sue Greenhill, Rosalind Oxenford and my mother Ellinor Thesen. My researches have been helped enormously by the kindness and scholarship of Kenneth Parker, editor of Dorothy’s letters. At Chicksands, Brigadier Euan Duncan, his wife Jacqueline and staff – Lieutenant Colonel Charles Dale, Julia Benson and Doreen Hoare – could not have been more helpful, informative and welcoming, making my visit on a beautiful summer’s day unforgettable.

  Most thanks are due to Dorothy’s descendants, Sir Richard Osborn 9th Baronet and Mrs Sarah Saunders-Davies, whose mother, the late Lady Constance Osborn, collected their family history into a series of remarkable volumes I have been lucky enough to consult. I remember with pleasure the hospitality of each family and am particularly grateful for my visits to the Saunders-Davies’s river paradise from where Sarah generously took me to Chicksands, Moor Park and Waverley Abbey, with many a great laugh and conversation along the way. It brought me closer to Dorothy and William: we walked in the shade they walked in and through the stone cloisters that Dorothy knew as a child. Three centuries and more barely mattered.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JANE DUNN is the biographer of the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell in A Very Close Conspiracy, and of Mary Shelley. She has written a groundbreaking biography of Antonia White and most recently the bestselling Elizabeth and Mary. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Bath.

  PRAISE

  From the reviews of Read My Heart:

  ‘Jane Dunn is a gifted storyteller, who writes with fluency and wit. She has produced a biography that is also an excellent guide to the tumultuous seven decades through which the Temples lived and loved’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Dunn draws on Osborne’s seventy-seven extant letters to convey the ardour and struggle of their courtship … These letters are full of wit, tenderness and defiance; they are love letters in a double sense: for their addressee, and also for the letter as a literary form’

  TLS

  ‘A double life is a tricky enterprise, Dunn is clearly fascinated by this unusual equilibrium, and by the way in which Dorothy’s letters continue to wield their force. Everyone who reads Dorothy Osborne falls in love. Read My Heart is a book about happiness, which came at a cost to Dorothy and William but continued to be an ideal’

  Sunday Times

  ‘Read My Heart is a delight. The final chapters show that in spite of bereavements and disappointments and all the other baggage that ordinary life brings with it, this particular “Romance Story” had the right ending’

  Literary Review

  ‘Using [a] precious archive, Jane Dunn has pieced together the marvellous story of their clandestine courtship. What is wonderfully demonstrated in Dunn’s account of their later lives is the sense of this being a real story as well as a romance. Although their love story is beautiful, and Dunn brings to life the dramatic age in which they lived, what moved me most about Read My Heart was the characters of William and Dorothy as individuals as much as lovers’

  Daily Mail

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  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

  COPYRIGHT

  HarperPress

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  First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2008

  Copyright © Jane Dunn 2008

  PS Section copyright © Sarah O’Reilly 2009, except ‘Growing Up in the Seventeenth Century: The Insiders’ View’ by Jane Dunn © Jane Dunn 2009 PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  Jane Dunn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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