Dorothy Osborne

Dorothy Osborne, Lady Temple (1627–1695) was an English writer of letters and wife of Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet.

Life

Osborne was born at Chicksands Priory, Bedfordshire, England, the youngest of twelve children of Sir Peter Osborne, Lieutenant-Governor of the Isle of Guernsey under Charles I of England, by his wife Dorothy Danvers, a sister of Sir John Danvers the regicide. The Osbornes were a staunchly Royalist family.

After refusing a long string of suitors put forth by her family, including her cousin Thomas Osborne, 1st Duke of Leeds, Henry Cromwell (son of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell) and Sir Justinian Isham, in 1654 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 survives, comprising a collection of 79 letters held in the British Library (Add MS 33975).

Osborne fell in love with Temple in 1647, when the pair were both about nineteen years old. Although both families opposed the match on financial grounds, seventeenth-century marriages frequently being business arrangements, she steadfastly remained single. Following the death of her father, the couple's families sanctioned the match, bringing to a close nearly seven years of intermittent courtship—the latter two marked by the famous exchange of letters. The wedding took place on 25 December 1654, and the marriage lasted until Lady Temple's death on 7 February 1695.