Margaret Cavendish

Margaret Cavendish was the first woman to publish a great deal in English, and she did so under her own name. Her writing includes poetry, fiction, drama, biography, autobiography, essays, fictional letters, and philosophy (especially philosophy of science). Although it is not widely known these days, she was treated with respect by many intellectuals of her time. Her life writing was read and probably imitated by other women such as Lucy Hutchinson. Hutchinson’s biography of her husband, Colonel Hutchinson, shows signs of influence from Cavendish’s earlier and similar biography. Nevertheless, Cavendish was, until the mid-1980s, taken to be of marginal importance as a writer and thinker. Her unusual dress, her work on difficult philosophical topics, and her choosing to have her writing published caused her to be widely regarded as eccentric. Dorothy Osborne (Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, cited under Reception History (Primary Materials)) suggested in a letter to William Temple that Cavendish belonged in Bedlam, but Osborne found Cavendish amusing rather than dangerous or threatening. Samuel Pepys (The Diary of Samuel Pepys, cited under Reception History (Primary Materials)) did feel threatened and believed that Cavendish’s husband should assert control over her writing. Horace Walpole (A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, Scotland, and Ireland; with Lists of Their Work, cited under Reception History (Primary Materials)) ridiculed Cavendish (while possibly borrowing from her for his play The Mysterious Mother). Charles Lamb Essays of Elia, cited under Reception History (Primary Materials)) found her delightfully odd. Virginia Woolf’s acerbic remarks about Cavendish in The Common Reader (1925) and Room of One’s Own (1929) have been much quoted, but probably hide a sympathy felt by Woolf for a woman whom she believed to be another shy writer. The word “coarse” often appears in 19th-century printed sources in connection with Cavendish, though it is never explained or contextualized. The word is probably connected to low comedy found in her poems about Queen Mab and to Grammont’s 1713 story (The Memoirs of Count Grammont, cited under General Overview) of her as a woman with an eye for young men. Grammont’s view remains generally unnoticed in academe. In the 1980s, Cavendish’s reputation as an eccentric began to fade and her writing increasingly was taken seriously. Her work came to be the subject of scholarly articles, and much of what she wrote, especially Blazing World, was assigned in post-secondary classrooms. The focus in both teaching and research has been on the plays (which have received classroom performance), The Blazing World (as a utopia), and the philosophy (especially panpsychism and the poems about animals). During the 21st century, Cavendish has found her way into the mainstream of public intellectual discourse, as evidenced by Siri Hustvedt’s 2014 novel The Blazing World, cited under Creative Approaches to Cavendish including Modern Interpretations of Her Plays). Merve Emire’s New Yorker article (New Yorker, cited under Intellectual History), and a large number of websites and blogs run outside of academe.