Other correspondents and visitors to oates during these years were isaac newton and anthony collins , a young squire of the neighborhood , who afterwards made his mark in the intellectual controversies of the time .
Certainly parts of the narrative read like an 18th-century novel : at 17 , delany was married by her wicked uncle to a 60-year-old drunken squire , who tore her away from her family to live in a rotting cornish castle .