No longer in the political vanguard, the Newcastles retired almost immediately to their least damaged estate, Welbeck in Nottinghamshire. It was there that Margaret wrote another seven books of orations, letters, scientific speculation, Utopian fiction, biography, poetry and closet drama, as well as overseeing a number of reissues and revised editions, before her sudden death in December, 1673, at the age of fifty.6

Margaret Cavendish was devoted to personal excess, and the number of substantial, elaborately produced books she wrote and published under her own name and at considerable expense, in a career spanning twenty years, constituted her most radical and deliberate infringement of contemporary proprieties. But Cavendish’s writing is not only copious and unusually secular, it is also overtly polemical and formally experimental. Her writings, collectively and individually, demonstrate an abiding fascination with kinds as such, and particularly with impure and unexpected hybrids. An interrogation of systems of knowledge and modes of description, as well as the fluid relations between gender and genre, informs all of Cavendish’s writing, and marks it as generically self-conscious and ambitious.

Like most students of genre, her imagination is not primarily focused on normative or pure kinds. It is most engaged by that which troubles or resists categorization, thereby engendering reflection on the nature and function of categorization itself. Both Cavendish herself, and her writings, have similarly challenged categorization. That the spectacle of Cavendish as a writing woman has disturbed commentators is clear. Her writings have suffered a similar resistance, leading generations of commentators to suggest that paraphrase is as much as, or more than, her work requires.7

This collection contributes to the overdue project of making Cavendish’s writing available and accessible to the modern reader, so that the contents of her books, and not the there fact of their existence, may begin to receive the attention that her life has (relatively speaking) rarely lacked. It includes three notable experiments in short fiction. The first two, ‘The Contract’ and ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’, are romance narratives taken from Nature’s Pictures (1656); neither has been reissued since the seventeenth century. The third is her Utopian fantasy, The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World. Thought to be the only text of its kind by a seventeenth-century woman,8 it was first published as the fictional companion piece to Cavendish’s lengthy scientific treatise, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy (1666). In the context of recent critical interest in Utopian writing and the history of women’s writing, The Blazing World has begun to attract the attention it deserves.9 Perhaps we are at least one instance of that future audience which Margaret Cavendish so fervently desired, for certainly her work is compelling in terms of the current remapping of literary histories, and the relations of gender and literary genres.

There is pathos, and some would say justice, in the historical diminution of so extravagant a textual self-witnessing, but the works represented here demonstrate Cavendish’s real interest as a writer of prose fiction, particularly in terms of her experiments with allegory and romance, utopia and the imaginary voyage. Cavendish self-consciously produced herself as a fantastic and singular woman, and that labour of self-representation successfully dominated seventeenth century and later accounts of both her life and writing. Pepys’s often-quoted remark, ‘The whole story of this Lady is a romance, and all she doth is romantic’10, was a shrewd reading of a woman who represented herself as figuratively hermaphrodite.11 Her idiosyncratic dress combined masculine and feminine elements in a parodic masquerade of gender, while her rare and highly theatrical public appearances never failed to draw an audience.12 But her singularity has also, and perhaps more commonly, been interpreted as monstrous, and her texts similarly characterized as deformed in various ways: chaotic, old-fashioned, uneven, contradictory and insane.13

Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own, figures Margaret Cavendish as ‘a vision of loneliness and riot … as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death’.14 It is a fanciful but hardly innocent conceit, representing Cavendish as producing disproportionate and monstrously masculine texts. Amongst contemporary women, Dorothy Osborne remarked, on the publication of Cavendish’s first book, ‘there are many soberer people in Bedlam; I’ll swear her friends are much to blame to let her go abroad’.15 Osborne’s confusion of Cavendish’s book and her person, whether witting or unwitting, is characteristic of the atextual way in which Cavendish’s work – and indeed life – has tended to be read: as a vehicle for or byproduct of personality, and a receptacle for ideas.

At first Cavendish’s extremely unfeminine works were thought to be not her own work. The ‘Epistle’ which introduces Cavendish’s autobiographical memoir refutes the gossip ‘that my writings are none of my own’ (p. 363) in a complex way. She uses it as the ground of a more sophisticated questioning of the continuity between text and self, as well as the relations between thinking, writing and speaking, ‘for I have not spoke so much as I have writ, nor writ so much as I have thought’ (p. 367). The closing paragraph of the ‘Epistle’ is characteristic of Cavendish’s ironic self-defence, and of her rhetorical dexterity:

But if they will not believe my books are my own, let them search the author or authoress: but I am very confident that they will do like Drake, who went so far about, until he came to the place he first set out at. But for the sake of after-ages, which I hope will be more just to me than the present, I will write the true relation of my birth, breeding, and to this part of my life, not regarding carping tongues, or malicious censurers, for I despise them.

Margaret Newcastle

As she maintains, the life cannot bear witness to the truth of authorship. Instead she supplies the text of her life in lieu of any incontrovertible proof, and as a further instance of the endlessly asymmetrical but productive relations of experience and writing. Cavendish’s numerous prefaces and addresses to the reader constitute a fragmentary but copious poetics, probably the most extensive theorization we have available to us of an individual seventeenth century woman’s relation to the resources of writing and publication, and the gendered construction of knowledge, in a secular context.

Cavendish used the interdicted practices of writing and publishing to challenge the negative consequences for women of patriarchal codes of femininity, delighting in the subversive potential of generic and intellectual hybridization. In her polemical prefaces Cavendish trenchantly defends her own right to publish, and to participate in current debates, but she also insists on the rational and sensitive capacities of all women, and the educational handicap under which they labour. The egalitarian potential of her sexual critique is, however, seriously curtailed by an equally powerful commitment to the prerogatives of absolute monarchy and hierarchical privilege so thoroughly undermined in the 1640s and ‘50s. In part this allegiance might be traced to the fact that Cavendish’s marriage to the Marquis, later Duke of Newcastle, was extremely socially advantageous. As Mendelson argues, ‘Margaret displayed the exaggerated respect of an arriviste for a title’ (Mendelson, 22). But Newcastle was also in exile, and Margaret was courted by him when she herself was in the service of the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria.

Cavendish adopted an entirely defensive position with respect to radical political theory, but her political conservatism does not vitiate the power of her sexual critique, and need not surprise us any more than the familiar alliance of ‘radical’ politics and ‘conservative’ sexual politics.