Everything She Does

As for any seventeenth-century girl fortunate enough to be educated, the schooling of Lucy, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley (then Lieutenant of the Tower of London), was in the hands of a private tutor. Some years later, Lucy Hutchinson née Apsley would remark that in Latin “I outstript my brothers who were at schoole”, despite the fact that the tutor (her father’s chaplain) was “a pittifull dull fellow”. Outstripping her brothers in Latin indirectly resulted in Hutchinson embarking on the challenging task of translating a six-book hexameter account of Epicurean philosophy into English: Lucretius’ De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”). [Opening Paragraph]