‘Is it possible that my sister […] has had a baby?’

Though marriage and motherhood were acknowledged as markers of the transition from childhood to adulthood for early modern women, many did not experience these events as definitive. Sisters Elisabeth and Charlotte-Brabantine of Orange-Nassau, and Elisabeth’s daughter, Marie de la Tour d’Auvergne, carried girlhood inexperience and uncertainties into their new lives as wives and mothers. Their own letters, and letters written to or about them, offer evidence for, and were an important part of, their passage from youthful, somewhat self-centred uncertainty to confident, outward-looking maturity and involvement in broader political and religious matters.