Gender, Genre and Canonicity: Dorothy Osborne’s Letters to Sir William Temple

Abstract

Dorothy Osborne's letters occupy a special place in the canon of early modern women's writing. Virginia Woolf singled her out as a gifted writer, indeed as an early sign of life-'a rustling in the undergrowth'-in a 'bare season' for women's writing, but one limited nonetheless by contemporary attitudes to women and the genre in which she wrote. She writes 'since no woman of sense and modesty could write books, Dorothy, who was sensitive and melancholy [ ... ] wrote nothing. Letters did not count.' Surely Woolf overstates her point for effect here; at issue is not that letters did not count, but what they count for. Osborne's letters were praised by her contemporaries; they have been in print since the early nineteenth-century; and they have an established place in histories of English literature and society. In this sense they have had canonical status for some time. When Woolf announces that letters do not count she is voicing Osborne's response to Margaret Cavendish's latest publication:'Sure the poore woman is a litle distracted, she could never bee soe ridiculous else as to venture at writeing book's and in verse too'. Osborne views print publication as improper for a woman, but sees letter-writing differently. Woolf adds, letter writing 'was an art that a woman could practice without unsexing herself,'that is without disrupting mores of feminine behaviour. Osborne could secretly compose a letter to a suitor forbidden by her family while sitting dutifully by her father's sickbed (1932, pp.60-61).