Margaret the First

The reason I know anything at all about Mad Madge, aka Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, is entirely coincidental: she features heavily in (and supplies the title of) Siri Hustvedt’s excellent novel The Blazing World, which I happen to have read. In the 17th century, she was that rare and stunted unicorn, a female writer demanding to be taken seriously. Why is she so little-known when her contemporaries and near-contemporaries – Samuel Pepys, Thomas Hobbes, and Rene Descartes, to name a few – are bywords? (In fairness, I believe Pepys’s diaries do refer to her, though not with approval.) This fictionalised biography attempts to go some way towards remedying that gap.

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