Margaret Cavendish

Margaret Cavendish was one of the most prolific, diverse, and maverick writers of the seventeenth century. Born Margaret Lucas in c. 1623, she had a volatile life. After the English Civil Wars broke out and much of her home was destroyed, she successfully petitioned to become Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Henrietta. As the war intensified, the queen and her entourage, including Cavendish, escaped to Paris while closely pursued by enemy ships firing at them. In Paris, she married William Cavendish, a royalist commander and patron of many intellectuals. Thus, her marriage to William provided her with the opportunity to socialize with famous intellectuals such as Descartes and Hobbes and hear firsthand about the latest developments in science and philosophy. After living for four years in Paris and a few months in Rotterdam, the Cavendishes settled in Antwerp for nearly twelve years. With the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Margaret and William Cavendish moved back to England. Throughout the Civil War and Restoration, however, she remained an unusually secular writer for this period. Being the first British woman to publish several treatises in natural philosophy, Cavendish also wrote in nearly every available literary genre such as poetry, drama, prose fiction, autobiography, biography, orations, essays, romance, and fictional letters. In addition, she is the first-known woman to write science fiction and an early pioneer of the genre, adding new, innovative concepts to the genre such as aliens living in an entirely different solar systems, multiverses, submarine warfare, and the possibility of armies of the dead. Despite prohibitions against English women’s enrollment in universities, Cavendish asserted herself as a public intellectual, pointedly sending many of her publications to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge where women were not allowed to enroll as students. In her writings, she explores an impressive range of topics including, but not limited to, race, empire, gender, sexuality, animal intelligence, politics, war, materialism, spirits, religion, philosophy, science, aesthetics, selfhood, and education. Such topics are often explored in her literature as well as her philosophical treatises and she has generated intense scholarly interest from diverse academic disciplines. Contrary to now debunked claims in earlier scholarship, she was never called Mad Madge during her lifetime even if her ideas were unorthodox and often challenged the early modern cultural milieu. While she had her detractors, she was admired by a number of intellectuals of the day such as Constantine Huygens, Bathsua Makin, and Royal Society men such as Walter Charleton, Joseph Glanville, and Nehemiah Grew, the secretary of the Royal Society.