The Project Gutenberg EBook of 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: ASCII

*** 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