By Allen D. Boyer
Samuel Pepys thought he had the measure of Margaret Cavendish—poet, dramatist, patron, natural philosopher, and wife of the Duke of Newcastle. “The whole story of this lady is a romance, and all she do is romantic,” he wrote.
Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish is the first book by Francesca Peacock, a London journalist who writes on history and culture. Pure Wit is by no means a romance. It is a well-told tale of talent, ambition, effort, and the mixed blessing of a ducal title.
Pepys caught the glamorous second act of Cavendish’s career. The opening act had played out against the English Civil War. The family home was looted; their lands were sequestered; one brother was shot for treason, another died of a war wound. Young Margaret Lucas, barely twenty, went into Continental exile with Queen Henrietta Maria. In Paris, Margaret’s fortunes changed. She met and married a fellow exile, William, duke of Newcastle, a widower known as a patron of learning.
In Restoration London, Cavendish was eager to win credit as a writer and thinker. She succeeded all too well at making herself a celebrity. She had a penchant for both wearing men’s clothing and recklessly displaying decolletage. “She looked so like a cavalier, but that she had no beard,” John Evelyn wrote; Pepys described her as “naked-necked,” “a good, comely woman.” On a visit to the Royal Society, she all but stormed the hall, arriving in a coach, with attendants to carry her train. A Victorian antiquary called her Mad Madge, a nickname which stuck. She would be remembered as an eccentric.
Those who acknowledged Cavendish as a writer often doubted her seriousness. Virginia Woolf found in Cavendish “something noble and quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted.” But beyond the splash and display, Peacock points out, there is plentiful evidence of Cavendish’s writerly stamina. In revising her work, Cavendish cut whole chapters on Stuart monarchs, eased rough metrical patches in her verse, even marked up lines in her plays. As the mistress of a magnate’s household, she also prepared a line-by-line audit of her husband’s assets, rents, and financial losses.
Cavendish had experimented with quicksilver and prisms. More often, she delved into questions of natural philosophy, which the Royal Society preferred to reserve for its male savants. The age was one that borrowed concepts from philosophy (life, causation, motion, mind, thought) to discuss matters nowadays considered in terms of physics and chemistry. Cavendish was a materialist. When she wrote of the Creation, she did not mention a deity. She argued that thought is a function of matter, not any separate transcendent mind or soul. And all matter thinks and is intelligent, she maintained, down to the level of the atom.
In one poem, “A World in an Earring,” Cavendish elaborated this theme. “An earring round may well a zodiac be,” she conjectured. As Peacock points out, Cavendish was familiar with microscopes. “She understood that there was a level of existence that was not accessible to unaided human sight . . . . The possibilities of invisible atoms go one step further: here, in an earring, is the possibility of unending alternative worlds, and unending alternative futures.”
It is complicated to claim Cavendish as either a radical or a conservative—equally hard to judge whether her title allowed her the freedom to publish, or invited jibes that only her title allowed her to publish. Peacock warns of “multiple contradictions” among which Cavendish steered, “between Cavendish’s liberatory instincts, her belief in the existing structures of hierarchy and power, and her imagined desire for separatist communities.”
There are hints of same-sex affection in Cavendish’s plays, though hardly more than in Twelfth Night or As You Like It. Peacock finds that her plays “are less the autobiography of one woman than they are a collective autobiography of ‘women’ as a whole.” Cavendish herself hinted at such a sisterhood: “Though there hath been a civil war in the kingdom, and a general war amongst the men, yet there hath been none amongst the women.”
A Description of a New Blazing World (1666) remains Cavendish’s most puzzling work—a social satire, conceivably a political allegory, perhaps a commentary on empirical science. In this novel, a kidnapped maiden, carried away on shipboard, is saved by a tempest which carries the ship through the North Pole to an alternative “blazing world.” Welcomed by talking animals, she is hailed as empress, works to set her realm in order, and in doing so meets the Duchess of Newcastle, who enters the book as a character. As a utopian work, The Blazing World follows the path of Sir Thomas More. It looks ahead to Jonathan Swift, perhaps even Ursula K. LeGuin.
In recent decades, Cavendish has figured in fiction, Danielle Dutton’s Margaret the First and The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt. There is also Katie Whitaker’s 2003 biography, Mad Madge, which Peacock rightly honors as “the most scholarly, and fair, book on Cavendish.” That study may remain the best close-focus portrait of Margaret Cavendish as an individual. But the strength of Peacock’s book is its treatment of Cavendish’s times, not simply her life. In particular, it calls the muster roll for a new-raised regiment of thinking, writing women.
Before Cavendish was born, in the reign of King James, women had issued pamphlets attacking misogyny—Constantia Munda, Ester Swernam, and young Rachel Speght, who dared to write under her own name. Aemila Lanyer had published verses and Lady Mary Wroth had authored The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, the most ambitious English novel since Le Morte Darthur. In her own day, Cavendish found appreciative readers, women who put in print what they believed about education and society (Bathsua Makin, Mary Astell, Lady Brilliana Harley). And, ironically, Cavendish the royalist duchess found her opposite number in Lucy Hutchinson, the fierce regicide’s wife who translated Lucretius and who likely drew on Cavendish’s Life of the Most Illustrious Prince, William Duke of Newcastle in shaping her own Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson.
The women who were writing in the Stuart century included royalist matrons as well as Quaker prophetesses. All could be called to attention by Cavendish: “Her female orations open with the repeated line ‘Ladies, Gentlewomen, and other Inferiors’: inferiority is the thing that links all women across the social spectrum.” Peacock concludes:
“If the history of feminism were limited to women who expressed their beliefs in women’s worth more or less as we do now, it would be a far shorter history . . . . Cavendish, Mary Astell, Bathsua Makin and a whole host of other female writers are not just ‘proto-feminists,’ imperfect thinkers on the road to some platonic ideal of feminism. They are part of its history, regardless of their contradictions and differences.”
“I am as I am, MARGARET NEWCASTLE,” Cavendish declared. Peacock lets that assertion speak for her.
Allen D. Boyer (ΦBK, Vanderbilt University) has recently published The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History, co-authored with Mark Nicholls. Vanderbilt University is home to the Alpha of Tennessee Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.