Alice Thornton and Dorothy Osborne

This chapter explores sibling ties from a sister’s perspective. Both women experienced fraught relationships with their brothers. Alice Thornton shows a young woman fighting back when her brother blocked her from the inheritance rightfully hers. In her frank autobiography, she justified her actions, while trying to avoid criticism of her brother tarnishing the family’s good name. Dorothy Osborne’s story centres on her brother Henry’s campaign to sabotage her love for William Temple and push her into a match he considered more acceptable. Henry’s diary and Dorothy’s letters give both sides of a complex and stormy relationship. Henry asserted his ‘rights’ as an elder brother, and believed that he was acting in his sister’s best interests. At the same time, he wanted an arrangement that would suit his own interests, and was driven by passionate emotions that revealed a clearly incestuous dimension.