author
Dorothy Osborne
1627–1695
Best known for the lively, intimate letters she wrote to her future husband, she gives readers a rare close-up view of love, family pressure, and everyday life in 17th-century England.
1 Audiobook
The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54
by Dorothy Osborne
About the author
Dorothy Osborne, later Lady Temple, was an English letter writer born in 1627 at Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire. She is remembered above all for the letters she wrote to William Temple during their courtship in the early 1650s, letters admired for their wit, warmth, and frank picture of domestic and social life.
Her family opposed the match for a time, but she and Temple eventually married in 1654 or 1655. The surviving correspondence has outlasted the private world it came from, and many readers value it not just as a love story but as a vivid record of a thoughtful woman negotiating affection, duty, and expectation.
She died in February 1695 at Moor Park in Surrey. Although she did not publish as a literary celebrity in her lifetime, her letters later earned her a lasting place in English literary history.