The Friend (review)
as a protofeminist or a believer in gender parity: “She both condemned women’s inequality and affirmed its necessity” (32). Chapter 2, “An Audience of One: Dorothy as a Letter Writer,” lays out the functions Osborne’s letters performed: they were acts of rebellion against her family (both families opposed the marriage), they served as gifts for her absent lover, and they were substitutes for face-to-face conversation. But more importantly, the letters enabled Osborne not only to represent herself as a model wife but to develop a prospectus, again in dialogue with Temple, of an ideal marriage. The third and richest of the chapters to my mind, “Shared Privacies: Reading in the Osborne-Temple Courtship,” treats Osborne’s readings and use of French romances to form a shared ethos and sense of emotional and moral solidarity with her lover, who himself was a writer of romances. The couple’s joint readings of Gomberville, Scudéry, and Calprenède provided them with plenty of models and anti-models for their own courtship, thereby developing what Hintz calls a “readerly privacy” (85). In chapter 4, “Imagining the Couple: Triangularity and Surveillance,” Hintz observes that Osborne portrays certain characters — such as her servingwoman Jane Wright’s and her brother Henry Osborne — as threats to the couple’s privacy in order to strengthen the couple’s perception of their relationship as a safe haven in the face of a hostile world. The final chapter, “Illness and Emotional Attachment in Osborne’s Letters,” provides Hintz with a further springboard for her thesis. Osborne transforms even her illnesses into a locus for bonding, empathy, and emotions shared with her lover. Hintz sees Osborne’s episodes of malaria, other sicknesses — perhaps including the smallpox she contracted in 1654, though Osborne never mentions this disease in the letters — and, above all, the deep melancholy from which both Osborne and Temple suffered as opportunities for the two of them “to come together in the erotic thrill of sadness” (138). To sum up, while Hintz’s Audience of One provides interesting insights and information, she might have contributed more to bringing Osborne’s letters into the mainstream by engaging the growing body of scholarship on the interlocking themes of epistolography, life-writing, and gender in early modern Europe. I missed, for example, references to Thomas Mayer and D. R. Woolf’s important volume of essays on these issues (1995) or to any one of the some fifty pathbreaking volumes of texts and studies in Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr.’s, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series. DIANA ROBIN Chicago, Illinois