“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665times as Milton’s amanuensis – perhaps exaggerated, but quite incredible if it were
known she could not write. In later life she kept a school for young children.^42
Deborah’s apparent ability to write puts into question her own daughter’s report
that Milton did not have his daughters taught to write because he thought it “un-
necessary for a woman.”^43 Several stories about Milton’s relations with his daugh-
ters may invite skepticism, as they are reported long after the fact by variously
interested witnesses.^44 It seems unlikely that Milton would simply refuse to have his
daughters taught to write, if for no other reason than that the presence of able
scribes in his own household would have been a godsend to him, given his reduced
finances and the departure of some earlier pupil–assistants to other occupations. But
if his elder daughters could not or would not learn readily, Milton perhaps excused
them with this old canard, which Deborah repeated to her daughter to explain why
her aunts could not write, or at least not well. Milton did not educate his daughters
as gentlewomen of some fortune might be educated – in music, dancing, drawing,
writing, and modern languages – since his circumstances gave them no access to
such a station. Yet it seems unlikely that he refused on principle to teach them
languages, if for no other reason, again, than that some grasp of the matter in some
of the languages they read would have made them much more useful to him. He
had valued such learned women as Lady Ranelagh and Lady Margaret Ley, and had
any of his daughters seemed keenly interested in books it is hard to believe he
would not have responded. I suspect he made some effort to teach Mary and Deborah
some elements of Latin at least, using those literary texts Deborah could still recite
so many years later, but found them recalcitrant – Mary especially, who as the elder
would have been called on first for the reading sessions.
Why they resisted can be readily imagined: they could see no benefit to them-
selves (only to him) in such learning; they probably resented keenly the loss of
station, financial security, dowry, and marriage opportunities that his disgrace brought
upon them; they perhaps felt put upon in having to perform the constant personal
services a blind man would require; and they did not understand his genius or his
ideals. He on the other hand probably did not persist in efforts to teach them more
than pronunciation or to awaken a love of learning in them, being always too busy
to pay much attention to them or show them much affection; nowhere in his
writings or reported statements does he refer to them with love or tenderness.
Elizabeth Foster’s comment that he “kept his Daughters at a great distance” seems
plausible enough.^45 Phillips is carefully nonjudgmental in explaining their deficien-
cies, leaving it an open question whether they arose from defects in their natures or
in their education: “It had been happy indeed if the Daughters of such a Person had
been made in some measure Inheritrixes of their Father’s Learning; but... Fate
otherwise decreed” (EL 78).
Milton required his daughters’ services as rote readers when better help was not
at hand. Edward Phillips observed their growing restiveness over the years, under-
stood the reasons for it, and sympathized with them: