Margaret Cavendish’s “Mad” Imagination
In a time when women were not formally educated, Cavendish became a natural philosopher, an autobiographer, and a fiction writer—and was considered both an eccentric and a genius.
Cavendish’s tale “The Blazing World” is often celebrated as the first work of science fiction.
By Merve Emre
From her cabinet tumbled some of the strangest prose and verse of the seventeenth century/
At the end of her autobiography, the Duchess insists that the reason she wrote of her life was not to insure her fame as a writer. It was to preserve her soul as “second wife to the Lord Marquis of Newcastle,” she wrote, “especially if I should die and my Lord marry again.” She did indeed die, in 1673. The Duke did not remarry, and perhaps that was for the best; it is alarming to imagine a new wife reading “A Blazing World” and suddenly finding her mind crowded by the late Duchess’s dreamy, quizzical chatter.
William Cavendish cuts a loyal and supremely sympathetic figure. Mocked by his children, ignored by his king, enamored of his horses, and supportive (to a fault, perhaps) of his wife’s writing, he was lover and Platonick lover alike. He seemed happy to let the Duchess do more or less as she pleased and to affix his praise to the books that resulted. He saved what were likely his simplest words for her tomb, in Westminster Abbey: “This Dutches was a wise wittie & learned Lady, which her many Bookes do well testifie. She was a most Virtuous & a Loveing & carefull wife & was with her Lord all the time.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/pure-wit-the-revolutionary-life-of-margaret-cavendish-francesca-peacock-book-review