Read My Heart: Dorothy Osborne and Sir William Temple, A Love Story in the Age of Revolution. Jane Dunn
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a quality that was not necessarily appreciated, in a woman at least. ‘Often I have bin told,’ Dorothy wrote to William later, ‘that I had too much franchise in my humor [frankness in my disposition] and that ’twas a point of good breeding to disguise handsomly.’17 Dorothy’s excuse was that such discretion could hardly be expected from someone who had been isolated from court life since she was a child.
During this month of close company and constant conversation Dorothy and William discovered a rare compatibility: ‘his thoughts mett with hers as indeed they could not choos, since they had both but one heart,’ he added in one of his personalised romances written specially for her. It is most likely that it was William who first declared his feelings. He was of a more impetuous and immediately expressive nature: his sister described him as having ‘passions naturaly warme, & quick, but temper’d by reason & thought’.18 Dorothy anyway was horrified at the idea of a woman courting a man and objected to fictions where this was made to happen: ‘It will never enter into my head that tis possible any woman can Love where she is not first Loved.’19
Dorothy noticed that they had a similar recipe for contentment, possibly highlighted by their mutual response to the dream of living like Philemon and Baucis in their island retreat: ‘only you and I agree,’ she wrote later, ‘[contentment] tis to bee found by us in a True friend,* a moderat fortune, and a retired life’.20 This sense of destiny, made more intense by their youth (they were both just over twenty), would arm them against the pain of separation and frustration of their desires that they endured in the long years to come. The unusualness for the time of their dogged resistance to their parents’ wishes and their obstinate insistence on the pursuit of love also spoke of their own romantic temperaments and the extraordinary power of their clandestine letters to each other. These alone, through periods of extended separation and family harassment, were all they had to keep the flame alive and bolster each other’s belief in the possibility of marriage and consummation at last. ‘Read my heart,’ Dorothy wrote in one of her letters and that heartfelt quality is just what gave them such compelling force, for they carried all her intelligence, humour and longing for William in their separate exiles.
William and Dorothy united their fates against great practical, cultural and familial odds. Their falling in love with each other was not just a transformation of the heart. It involved a revolution against everything they had been bred to be, challenging the blind duty of children towards their parents, the pecuniary aspect of marriage and the inferiority of women in their relations with men.
Dorothy was intellectual, self-contained and enigmatic, her dark-eyed beauty perhaps inherited, along with her forthright character, from her Danvers grandmother, who the biographer John Evelyn claimed had Italian blood. William was even more conventionally good-looking; in Dorothy’s own words, ‘a very pritty gentleman and a modest [one]’.21 According to his sister his luxuriant dark brown hair ‘curl’d naturaly, & while that was esteem’d a beauty nobody had it in more perfection’.22 In an age of shaved heads and extravagant wigs, he wore his own hair long and unpowdered. He was tall and athletically built and overflowing with a breezy energy and enthusiasm that attracted everyone. Dorothy’s seriousness of mind would deepen his character while his own ‘great humanity & good nature, takeing pleasure in makeing others easy and happy’23 brought warmth and optimism to a woman who felt keenly the darker side of life. ‘I never apeare to bee very merry, and if I had all that I could wish for in the World I doe not thinke it would make any visible change in my humor,’24 was how she explained her naturally pensive, even sorrowful, expression.
Their stolen month of ecstatic discovery was brought to an abrupt end. Sir John Temple had learned with irritation that his son had barely travelled beyond the English shores; his irritation became alarm when he heard ‘the occasion of it’: his son’s delight in an impoverished young woman. He issued the stern parental order to depart to Paris without delay. This was an age when even grown children expected to obey their parents absolutely and in this William conformed immediately. Both he and Dorothy would continue to honour their parents’ wishes, even when they ran diametrically opposed to their own, although through evasion and covert rebellion they managed not always to comply. There were crucial material, social as well as moral imperatives for filial duty and both Temple and Osborne fathers intended to enforce them. For Dorothy and William to marry without family support meant a precipitous plunge into poverty as family money was withheld; and with the debilitating loss of social status came diminished opportunities for suitable employment. However, much as both families disliked the idea of love entering marriage negotiations and obstinately continued to frustrate this renegade plan, the subversive lovers made a private commitment to each other while in St Malo and trusted they might have a future together some day.
Looking back on their lives, William’s sister had thought his and Dorothy’s courtship was as good a love story as any fiction and that their letters should have been published as a ‘Volum’. ‘I have often wish’d the[y] might bee printed,’ she wrote, and even though she thought her brother’s writings exceptional it was Dorothy’s letters that she particularly admired: ‘I never saw any thing more extraordinary then hers.’25 This call for their publication was a radical statement at the time. It was perhaps a measure of how highly esteemed Dorothy’s letters were, even by contemporaries, that Martha could envisage personal love letters from a woman to a man, to whom she had been forbidden to write and had yet to marry, could ever properly be published when such exposure was considered unwomanly, or worse. The extreme vicissitudes of their love affair were recognised by everyone who knew them, and most acutely by Dorothy and William themselves, as making their story akin to the best fictional romances where true love was thwarted at every turn until the final satisfying embrace.
No letters survived from this first stage of their separation but both refer to this period in other contexts. In the following two to four years William re-wrote romances from the French* and amplified them for his own and Dorothy’s enjoyment. He also used the dramas to work out his own youthful thoughts and feelings on the conundrums of human experience and to distract him from his own unhappiness at being forcibly separated from the woman he loved. They were an outlet too for his frustrated desires, a proxy voice for feelings he was unable to express to her in person: ‘a vent to my passion, all I made others say was what I should have said myself to you upon the like occasion’.27 He revealed just how much she haunted him: ‘[I] shewd you a heart wch you have so wholly taken up that contentment could nere find a room in it since first you came there.’28 William told Dorothy they were meant to be read as letters from him to her.
A letter composed by William and introduced into the plot of one of these romances, The Constant Desperado, spoke directly to her alone, he declared, the more passionate the feeling, the more personally it was written for her: ‘you will find in this a letter that was meant to you though nere superscribd, and bee confident whatever in it is passionate said twas you indited [it was composed for you].’29
Embedding his messages in the overheated atmosphere of a French romance also gave William a means of communicating intense emotion and dramatic declarations without embarrassment. Despite some hyperbole necessary for the genre, his sense of loss and despair in being separated from Dorothy was real and direct and expressive of his own youth and overflowing feelings. It also gave an insight into her conversations with him before he left on his journey, when she feared most that his declarations