Dorothy Osborne, Letters

Kenneth Parker (University of East London)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.04: English Writing and Culture of the Seventeenth Century, 1625-1688.
Vol. editors: Jennifer Brady (Rhodes College), Daniel Cook (University of Dundee), Neil Forsyth (Université de Lausanne), Claire Preston (Queen Mary, University of London), J A Roe (University of York), Virginia Mason Vaughan (Clark University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1695

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Non-Fiction
- Letter(s)

Resources

The publication history and critical reception of the letters written clandestinely by Dorothy Osborne to William Temple provides ample evidence of the transformations in literary theory and cultural studies in the past 50 years. Heavily edited selections first appeared in 1936, as an appendix to the biography of the man to whom they were written, while the first otherwise excellent attempts at editions (1888; 1903; 1906; 1914; 1928) concentrated on reading them as evidence of quiet lives of the country gentry in the face of civil war. It was not until Virginia Woolf (1932) drew attention to the connection between the genre of letter-writing and class and gender that their qualities began to be re-assessed: not only as consummate …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1614 words

Citation: Parker, Kenneth. "Letters". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 October 2000 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4009, accessed 25 November 2024.]

Save this article