Pity the Bad Man

A bold new novel invites the reader to consider the plight of the bullies and the boors.

- Hillary Kelly

The story goes that John Milton— who went blind in his early 40s— composed 20 lines of Paradise Lost in his mind each evening, and then repeated them aloud the next day to an assortment of amanuenses, among them his three daughters. Their work has been especially romanticized. In portraits that hang in great museums, Milton gazes skyward, as if receiving his dictation from heaven, and the young women— Anne, Mary, and Deborah— lean toward him, eagerly awaiting his next divine word.

What the paintings don’t show is that these three women are generally believed to have loathed their father, who forced them to read aloud in languages they did not speak and to spend countless hours attending to his genius. When a family servant relayed the news of Milton’s marriage to their second and final stepmother (he hadn’t told them himself ), Mary is said to have drolly noted that if she “could hear of his death that was something.” One way to portray Milton is as a writer who entrusted his daughters with 11,000 intricate lines of his epic poem about Adam and Eve’s temptation in the Garden of Eden and the triumph of wily Satan. But if the lore about his disaffected daughters is true, they would perhaps have seen it differently: In accordance with his depiction of Eve as Adam’s simple helpmeet, their father assumed that they would be delighted to serve his mind, and he took little interest in their own endeavors. Then again, we don’t know their precise feelings— they didn’t have the opportunity to write them down.