The Blazing World and Other Writings (Penguin Classics)

THE BLAZING WORLD AND OTHER WRITINGS

MARGARET LUCAS CAVENDISH, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), was the youngest and minimally educated child of a wealthy Essex family. In 1643, the year after the outbreak of the English Civil War, she became a Maid of Honour to Queen Henrietta Maria, travelling with her into Parisian exile in 1644. There, in 1645, she married the widowed William Cavendish, Marquis (later Duke) of Newcastle (1593–1676), who had been commander of Charles I’s forces in the north, and a well-known patron of arts and letters. The Newcastles lived lavishly on credit in Antwerp from 1648 until the Restoration allowed their return to England in 1660. Between 1653 and 1668 Margaret Cavendish published a dozen substantial books including poetry, moral tales, speculative fiction, romance, scientific treatises, natural philosophy, familiar letters, closet drama, orations, an autobiographical memoir and a biography of her husband. The sheer quantity and variety of Cavendish’s published writing was unprecedented amongst earlier English women. These publications, and her cultivation of personal singularity, made her an infamous figure both in her own lifetime and since, subverting patriarchal codes of femininity while championing the legitimacy of monarchy. She appears in theatrical cameos in the writings of contemporaries like Pepys and Dorothy Osborne, and in subsequent accounts of maverick women by such writers as Charles Lamb and Virginia Woolf. Through her generically experimental and diverse writings, Margaret Cavendish emerges as an ironically self-designated spectacle, and as the self-proclaimed producer of hybrid creations and inimitable discourses, which are finally beginning to receive the attention that her life has rarely lacked.

KATE LILLEY (BA Hons., Sydney; Ph.D., London) began work on early modern women’s writing as Julia Mann Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford (1986–9). Her articles on seventeenth-century women’s writing appear in Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760 (1992) and Women/Writing/History 1640–1740 (1992). She is now a Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney. Her poetry is represented in The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry and The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets.

MARGARET CAVENDISH

DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE

The Blazing World

and Other Writings

Edited by

KATE LILLEY

BookishMall.com

BookishMall.com

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Pickering and Chatto 1992
Published in Penguin Classics 1994
Reprinted with a new Chronology and Further Reading 2004
14

Introduction and notes copyright © Kate Lilley, 1992, 2004
All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90482–5

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Note on this edition

Chronology

Works by Margaret Cavendish

Further Reading

From Nature’s Pictures (1656)

‘The Contract’

‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’

The Description of a New World, Catted The Blazing World (1666)

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank staff at Fisher Library, University of Sydney, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Australian Research Council; my editors, Janet Todd and Melanie McGrath; and for various kinds of assistance and support, Tim Armstrong, Rosalind Ballaster, Judith Barbour, Deirdre Coleman, Bruce Gardiner, Margaret Harris, Dorothy Hewett, Jeri Johnson, Merv Lilley, Bill Maidment, Tony Miller, David Nor-brook, Simon Petch, Susan Wiseman. Melissa Hardie’s help has been unstinting and invaluable.

INTRODUCTION

The range of Margaret Cavendish’s literary and scientific ambition, as well as her overt and frequently asserted desire for fame, has long made her an exemplary instance of woman as spectacle. The historical figure she cuts has aroused praise and blame, incredulity and pathos. As Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘her poems, her plays, her philosophies, her orations, her discourses – all these folios and quartos in which, she protested, her real life was shrined – moulder in the gloom of public libraries, or are decanted into tiny thimbles which hold six drops of their profusion’.1

Margaret Cavendish (née Lucas) was born in Essex in 1623, to a rich family, the youngest of eight children. Her father died when she was two, and it was her mother who provided an early and continuing example of female independence and administrative competence. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, the Lucas family moved to the Royalist stronghold of Oxford, where Margaret became a Maid of Honour to Queen Henrietta Maria. In 1644, she travelled as one of the Queen’s party into Parisian exile, where she met and married William Cavendish, the widowed Marquis of Newcastle. Thirty years Margaret’s senior, Newcastle had been commander of Charles I’s forces in the north, and was well known as a patron of arts and letters, and as a famous horseman. Though her marriage to Newcastle was socially and intellectually advantageous, it also committed Margaret to a life closely governed by the political fortunes of the Royalists.

After the execution of Charles I and the declaration of the Commonwealth in 1649, Newcastle was formally banished and his estates confiscated. He and Margaret lived in exile in Antwerp until the Restoration allowed them to return home, except for a crucial period in which Margaret returned to England, accompanied by her brother in law, Charles Cavendish, to petition for financial compensation for the loss of her husband’s estate. The petition failed but it was during this interregnum in Margaret’s married life, between late 1651 and early 1653, that she began to write and publish: a practice which she pursued energetically, copiously and diversely for the rest of her life. The sheer quantity and variety of Cavendish’s published work was extremely marked amongst women writers of the seventeenth century, and unprecedented amongst earlier English women writers.2

Cavendish launched her career as a writer by publishing two volumes in quick succession in 1653, Poems, and Fancies and Philosophical Fancies (in prose and verse). They were issued emphatically under her own name, like all the books that she subsequently published. If it was rare for a woman to seek publication, it was still more unusual for a woman to provide an unambiguous authorial signature. Margaret Cavendish’s writing career may have been inaugurated by her separation from her husband and return to England, but it was consolidated in range and quantity in exile, where she wrote another four books with her husband’s active encouragement and financial support.

In 1655 Cavendish issued another pair of reflections on political, philosophical, scientific and aesthetic topics, written in Antwerp. The World’s Olio (1655) is an engaging prose miscellany which includes ‘The Inventory of Judgement’s Commonwealth’. This condensed Utopian blueprint looked forward to Cavendish’s later experiments in this mode, ‘The Animal Parliament’ and The Blazing World. Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655, reissued ‘much altered’ in 1668 as Grounds of Natural Philosophy) continued her attempt to insert herself into a masculine public sphere, particularly through the discourse of the new science.3 In Nature’s Pictures, published in 1656, Cavendish again assembles a collection of short prose pieces and poetry, but it also signals her concerted expansion into other prose genres (or kinds). It is Cavendish’s most ambitious and copious generic experiment, including moral fables, romance novella (‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’), fictionalized treatise (‘The She Anchoret’), and the autobiographical memoir, ‘A True Relation’.4 At the same time she gave notice of her intention to publish a collection of closet drama also written in Antwerp, but its publication was delayed until 1662 after the manuscript was lost at sea.5

By the time the Newcastles returned to England at the Restoration, Cavendish’s reputation and infamy as a woman and as a writer was well established.