Fear of Words

Mark Kishlansky

• BuyThe Long Parliament of Charles II by Annabel Patterson
  Yale, 283 pp, £30.00, September 2008, ISBN 978 0 300 13708 8

Annabel Patterson’s passion and sense of justice were inbred, but her belief in what was possible and the drive to achieve it were acquired, learned at a time when women like her were sent to secretarial school. Born in England, she has had a long career in both Canada and the United States; she was a member of the English department at Duke before its immolation, and recently retired from a chair at Yale. Though she is most commonly associated with the writers of the English Renaissance, her production ranges widely, from Virgil to Valéry, as one of her titles has it. While no single set of interests has contained her imagination, many of her best-known books, and now this new one, The Long Parliament of Charles II, are centred on the major figures of the early modern era: Marvell, Shakespeare, Milton and, again, Marvell. Her lifelong struggle has been to achieve freedom of thought, freedom of expression and freedom of the press for 17th-century Englishmen. It is surprising how much success she has had.