The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple

These courtship letters, written mainly between 1652 and 1654, record Dorothy Osborne's correspondence with Sir William Temple while their families opposed the match. Writing from Chicksands and other country houses during the Commonwealth, she reports local marriages, illness, reading, and the interference of brothers and parents, and she weighs Temple's prospects against the risk of a clandestine engagement. The voice is intimate, ironic, and precise about money and reputation. The volume is a private letter sequence of one attachment, not a political history of the Interregnum and not a later memoir.

Bound in blue buckram with a signature in gold. Pink endleaves. Dark red slipcase.