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
In the Valhalla of English literature Anne Manning is sure of a littleand safe place. Her studies of great men, in which her imaginationfills in the hiatus which history has left, are not only literature inthemselves, but they are a service to literature: it is quiteconceivable that the ordinary reader with no very keen flair forpoetry will realise John Milton and appraise him more highly, havingread Mary Powell and its sequel, Deborah's Diary, than having readParadise Lost. In The Household of Sir Thomas More she had forhero one of the most charming, whimsical, lovable, heroical men Godever created, by the creation of whose like He puts to shame all thatmen may accomplish in their literature. In John Milton, whose firstwife Mary Powell was, Miss Manning has a hero who, though a supremepoet, was "gey ill to live with," and it is a triumph of her art thatshe makes us compunctious for the great poet even while we appreciatethe 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, MaryPowell, a seventeen-year-old girl, the daughter of an Oxfordshiresquire, who, with his family, was devoted to the King. It was at oneof the bitterest moments of the conflict between King and Parliament,and it was a complication in the affair of the marriage that MaryPowell's father was in debt five hundred pounds to Milton. Themarriage took place. Milton and his young wife set up housekeeping inlodgings in Aldersgate Street over against St. Bride's Churchyard, avery different place indeed from Forest Hill, Shotover, by Oxford, MaryPowell's dear country home. They were together barely a month whenMary Powell, on report of her father's illness, had leave to revisithim, being given permission to absent herself from her husband's sidefrom mid-August till Michaelmas. She did not return at Michaelmas; norfor some two years was there a reconciliation between the bride andgroom of a month. During those two years Milton published hispamphlet, On the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, begun while hisfew-weeks-old bride was still with him. In this pamphlet he stateswith violence his opinion that a husband should be permitted to putaway his wife "for lack of a fit and matchable conversation," whichwould point to very slender agreement between the girl of seventeen andthe poet of thirty-four. This was that Mary Powell, who afterwardsbore him four children, who died in childbirth with the youngest,Deborah (of the Diary), and who is consecrated in one of theloveliest 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 shi