Selected Letters

Donne John

Whether sharing his anxieties about his writing, consoling bereaved friends, complaining about the meanness of a patron or defending himself against malicious gossip, John Donne reveals himself in his letters with a directness that can be found nowhere else in his writings.

The 95 letters printed here in there entirety – dating from the late 1590s until a short time before Donne's death – constitute approximately half of his surviving correspondence. Addressed to a variety of recipients, they present the author of some of the most enduringly popular English verse as father, son, husband, friend, suitor, courtier and pastor. Although what the letters reveal of Donne is far from edifying, they corroborate the impression created by his better-known writings that he was one of the most remarkable figures produced by the English Renaissance and that he possessed an extraordinarily subtle and creative intelligence.

About the Author

John Donne developed one of the most distinctive and remarkable poetic voices of the English Renaissance. He also became a leading churchman: having been born and bred a Catholic (his mother was descended from Thomas More), he began asserting his loyalty to the Church of England in his twenties and was appointed Dean of St Paul's at the age of forty-nine. The first edition of his verse, which was published posthumously in 1633, contained a number of elegies commemorating him as one of the greatest preachers of his age. In his private life, however, he was dogged by insecurity and loss: in 1574 his mother's uncle was executed for saying Mass; ten years later one of her brothers narrowly avoided the same fate; and when Donne was twenty-one or so, his own brother died in Newgate, where he had been sent for harbouring a priest. Then, in 1601, Donne married the fifteen-year-old Ann More without her family's knowledge, precipitating a period of poverty and dependence which ended only with his ordination in 1615. Horrified by religious extremism, he occupied a moderate, central position in the fierce religious disputes of his day, enabling his parishioner Izaak Walton to present him, in the first edition of his "Life and Death of Dr Donne", as a man entirely without party allegiances who devoted himself to preaching and acts of charity.

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