Duchess of Newcastle, writer of the first utopia written by a woman; author of twenty-three published books including poetry, plays, science fiction, philosophical essays, romances, and autobiography
Margaret Cavendish nee Lucas was born in Essex, the youngest of eight children, to a wealthy royalist family. When the English Civil War broke out in 1642, the family moved to Oxford, where Margaret served as lady-inwaiting to Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of King Charles I of England (1600—1649). In 1644 she followed the queen into exile in Paris. There Margaret met and married the Royalist William Cavendish, the duke of Newcastle, who had commanded the king’s forces at Marston Moor. After the execution of King Charles I and Newcastle’s official banishment from England in 1549, Margaret and William lived as exiles in Antwerp. It was during this time that Margaret began writing. Margaret and her husband were well acquainted with Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the English philosopher, and through him they met Rene Descartes (1595-1650) and other notable intellectuals. Encouraged by her husband to pursue a career in writing, Margaret produced numerous works in verse and prose. Her first volume of poems was entitled Poems and Fancies (1653). Because of its status as a volume of poetry published by a woman, the work was received as an oddity in England. Cavendish’s contemporary, Dorothy Osborne, after reading the book, quipped in a letter to Sir William Temple “that there [were] many soberer People in Bedlam” (Battigelli 1998, 4). Two years after the publication of Poems and Fancies, Cavendish’s next major and most daring work, her fictional utopia, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1655), again elicited disparaging comments from her contemporaries. Cavendish’s experience in the English Civil Wars (ca. 1642-1648), reflected in all her writings, is perhaps most palpable in her utopian vision of society in The Blazing World.
The first utopian novel to be authored by a woman, The Blazing World is today acclaimed as a classic. Critics have also been slow to acknowledge the achievements of the two dozen plays that Cavendish authored. While recent
Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle and author of twenty-three books. Portrait by unkown artist. (Bettmann/Corbis)
Scholars such as Gweno Williams have argued for the performability of her plays and their valence as theater, questions about whether the plays were actually performed remain. Others have noted that Cavendish clearly had a public audience in mind whenever she wrote. In her many prefaces, she defends her writing, considers critical theory, and comments on the material aspects of the publication process. In spite of her own statements about her lack of formal training, comments for which her contemporaries and subsequent critics were only too willing to dismiss Cavendish and her work, Cavendish’s writings demonstrate her interest in the cultural and intellectual ideas circulating during her lifetime. Although Cavendish and her subsequent critics publicly stated that she never revised her works or cared about them after they had been published, textual evidence now exists documenting both her revisions and handmade corrections.
Margaret Cavendish gained notoriety because of her unusual dress and eccentric behavior, but it is through the legacy of her varied and extensive writings that her unique literary contributions should be assessed. Among those who criticized Cavendish, Samuel Pepys (1633— 1703) dismissed her as a “mad, conceited, ridiculous woman” (Bowerbank 1984, 392). In the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf spoke of the “loneliness and riot” of Cavendish’s writings, adding that it was “as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death” (Bowerbank 1984, 392). Recent reception of her work has focused not only on Cavendish’s engagement with the philosophical ideas and scientific experiments of her era but also on the originality and depth of her thought.
Debra Barrett-Graves
See also Cavendish, Elizabeth Brackley and Jane Cavendish; Literary Culture and Women; Theater and Women Actors, Playwrights, and Patrons.
Bibliography
Primary Works
Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle. The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays. Edited by Anne Shaver. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle. The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World and Other Writings. Edited by Kate Lilley. New York: New York University Press, 1992.
Secondary Works
Battigelli, Anna. Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998.
Bowerbank, Sylvia. “The Spider’s Delight: Margaret Cavendish and the ‘Female’ Imagination.” English Literary Renaissance 14, no. 3 (1984): 392-408.
Findlay, Alison, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, and Gweno Williams. Women and Dramatic Production: 1550-1700. Harlow, UK: Longman,
2000.
Straznicky, Marta. “Reading the Stage: Margaret Cavendish and Commonwealth Closet Drama.” Criticism 37, no. 3 (1995): 355-390.
Whitaker, Katie. Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by Her Pen. New York:
Basic Books, 2002.
World History
