Mary Powell Deborahs Diary

Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary,
by Anne Manning

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Title: Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary
Author: Anne Manning
Release Date: May 14, 2007 [EBook #21431]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARY
POWELL & DEBORAH'S DIARY ***

Produced by Al Haines

Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary
by
Anne Manning

A tale which holdeth children from play & old men from the chimney
corner --Sir Philip Sidney

London: published by J. M. Dent & Co.
and in New York by E. P. Dutton & Co.
1908

INTRODUCTION
In the Valhalla of English literature Anne Manning is sure of a little
and safe place. Her studies of great men, in which her imagination fills
in the hiatus which history has left, are not only literature in themselves,
but they are a service to literature: it is quite conceivable that the
ordinary reader with no very keen flair for poetry will realise John
Milton and appraise him more highly, having read Mary Powell and its
sequel, Deborah's Diary, than having read Paradise Lost. In The
Household of Sir Thomas More she had for hero one of the most
charming, whimsical, lovable, heroical men God ever created, by the
creation of whose like He puts to shame all that men may accomplish
in their literature. In John Milton, whose first wife Mary Powell was,
Miss Manning has a hero who, though a supreme poet, was "gey ill to
live with," and it is a triumph of her art that she makes us compunctious
for the great poet even while we appreciate the difficulties that fell to
the lot of his women-kind. John Milton, a Parliament man and a Puritan,
married at the age of thirty-four, Mary Powell, a seventeen-year-old
girl, the daughter of an Oxfordshire squire, who, with his family, was
devoted to the King. It was at one of the bitterest moments of the
conflict between King and Parliament, and it was a complication in the
affair of the marriage that Mary Powell's father was in debt five
hundred pounds to Milton. The marriage took place. Milton and his
young wife set up housekeeping in lodgings in Aldersgate Street over
against St. Bride's Churchyard, a very different place indeed from

Forest Hill, Shotover, by Oxford, Mary Powell's dear country home.
They were together barely a month when Mary Powell, on report of her
father's illness, had leave to revisit him, being given permission to
absent herself from her husband's side from mid-August till
Michaelmas. She did not return at Michaelmas; nor for some two years
was there a reconciliation between the bride and groom of a month.
During those two years Milton published his pamphlet, On the
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, begun while his few-weeks-old
bride was still with him. In this pamphlet he states with violence his
opinion that a husband should be permitted to put away his wife "for
lack of a fit and matchable conversation," which would point to very
slender agreement between the girl of seventeen and the poet of
thirty-four. This was that Mary Powell, who afterwards bore him four
children, who died in childbirth with the youngest, Deborah (of the
Diary), and who is consecrated in one of the loveliest and most
poignant of English sonnets.
Methought I saw my late-espouséd Saint Brought to me like Alkestis
from the grave, Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint. Mine, as whom
washed from spot of child-bed taint Purification in the Old Law did
save; And such, as yet once more, I trust to have Full sight of her in
Heaven without restraint, Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight Love, sweetness, goodness,
in her person shined So clear, as in no face with more delight. But oh!
as to embrace me she inclined, I waked; she fled; and Day brought back
my Night.
It is a far cry from the woman so enshrined to the child of seventeen
years who was without "fit and matchable conversation" for her
irritable, intolerant poet-husband.
A good many serious writers have conjectured and wondered over this
little tragedy of Milton's young married life: but since all must needs be
conjecture one is obliged to say that Miss Manning, with her gift of
delicate imagination and exquisite writing, has conjectured more
excellently than the