Margaret Cavendish
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, born Margaret Lucas at Saint John’s Abbey, Essex, was a seventeenth-century poet, philosopher, playwright, and essayist. Although she received little formal education, Cavendish had access to libraries and tutors and began to write down her ideas at an early age, as well as engage in intellectual conversations with her brother, Sir John Lucas.
After joining the royal court as Maid of Honor to Queen Henrietta Maria, the consort of King Charles I, Cavendish accompanied the queen into exile in France in 1644, two years after the outbreak of the English Civil War. It was in Paris that Cavendish met her husband, William Cavendish, then Marquess (later, Duke) of Newcastle. They married in 1645 and moved first to Rotterdam and later, Antwerp, where Cavendish published her first five books.
While in exile, Cavendish attended a regular salon hosted by her husband’s brother, Sir Charles Cavendish, which was attended by guests such as the philosophers René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, and the diplomat Sir Kenelm Digby. A philosophical and scientific thinker, Cavendish’s first book of poetry, Poems and Fancies (J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1653), explored topics about both the natural world and of society and politics. That same year, she published Philosophical Fancies (J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1653), a book of prose. She was notable at the time as a woman publishing under her own name. Her next works, The World’s Olio (J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655) and Philosophical and Physical Opinions (J. Martin, and J. Allestrye, 1655), continued to explore philosophy and science through prose. In 1656, she published Nature’s Pictures (J. Martin and J. Allestrye), a book of both poetry and prose and her last work to be published before the end of her exile.
Although Cavendish had authored, by that point, several books, she was routinely dismissed by her male contemporaries. Her efforts to mail copies of her work to scholars and libraries, requesting commentary and correspondence, were met with unenthusiastic responses, if any at all. Her Philosophical Letters (1664) were an attempt to engage in the philosophical discourse of the time by writing her own imagined responses from authors and philosophers. She was later able to engage in some conversations with men of intellectual renown as well as with visitors to her home: writer John Evelyn and philosopher Walter Charleton.
Regarded as an eccentric by her contemporaries, Cavendish was known for her unusual style in addition to her strange and fantastical work. While not always respected by her male peers, she had gained notoriety, particularly for her extravagant gowns, cavalier hats, and justaucorps jackets, traditionally worn by men. Her mode of dress made her the target of both positive and negative interest, with consideration of her statuses as both a duchess and a writer.
The Blazing World (Anne Maxwell, 1666), Cavendish’s only novel, is regarded as one of the earliest iterations of science fiction and her most well-known work. She also penned two biographies: A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life (J. Martin & J. Allestrye, 1656) and The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendish (Anne Maxwell, 1667); the first is an autobiography and the second is a biography of her husband. It was during this period that two volumes of Cavendish’s plays were printed: Plays (A. Warren, 1662) and Plays, Never Before Printed (Anne Maxwell, 1668). None of her stage works were produced during her lifetime. From her first publication to her death, Cavendish released nearly a book a year. She would frequently revise and reissue her work, resulting in many of her titles being printed several times. Her final original work, Grounds of Natural Philosophy (Anne Maxwell, 1668), was a defense of her philosophical views on the natural world.
Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies with the Animal Parliament was rereleased by Iter Press in 2018 in the first complete modernized version of the third edition. Brandie Siegfried, professor of English at Brigham Young University, described Cavendish’s poems in this volume as taking “shape as a kind of intellectual cartography as Cavendish carefully mapped for herself a view of the scientific terrain.” Siegfried continues, “[The poems] do not fit familiar literary categories such as pastoral, lyric, devotional, erotic, or epic, although they do make use of features from each of these poetic forms.”
Cavendish died on December 15, 1673, in London. She is buried in Westminster Abbey.