Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne

After refusing a long string of suitors put forth by her family, including her cousin Thomas Osborne, Henry Cromwell (son of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell) and Sir Justinian Isham, in 1655 Dorothy Osborne married Sir William Temple, a man with whom she had carried on a lengthy clandestine courtship that was largely epistolary in nature. It is for her letters to Temple, which were witty, progressive and socially illuminating, that Osborne is remembered. Only Osborne's side of the correspondence survived and comprises a collection of seventy-seven letters held in the British Library.