Catherine Gallagher has argued that it is a commitment to absolutism which contradictorily enabled Margaret Cavendish’s critique of women’s effective exclusion from political subjecthood and citizenship. I would suggest that Cavendish’s simultaneous insistence on the (unrecognized) justice of her social privilege, shaped by her experiences in the years of political exile, and her call for the development of women’s (unrecognized) potential, stems from her extraordinarily ambivalent position with respect to the discourses of power. She was the socially inferior wife of a defeated and later displaced Royalist leader; the minimally educated maid-in-waiting of a deposed queen; the youngest of a large family, financially straitened and physically decimated in the course of the Civil Wars. For nearly twenty years Cavendish lived as a purely English-speaking resident of France and the Netherlands, the opulence of her married life sustained by her husband’s perpetual, and remarkably successful, negotiations with creditors. Though she dined with Descartes, and infamously visited the all-male enclave of the Royal Society in London,16 she could not appropriate for herself the (masculine) position of dilettante in its honorific sense. In terms of politics, gender and discourse, Cavendish could never achieve the full membership she craved, though she tried to turn her maverick status to her own advantage.

This ambivalence is crucial to Cavendish’s most explicitly autobiographical writings, ‘A True Relation’ and her biography of the Duke of Newcastle. In these texts she offers idealized representations of her family, her husband and her marriage in the context of a tragic narrative of the suffering imposed on them (and her) by political events. She offers a catalogue of losses which not even the Restoration could restore. In her writings, Margaret Cavendish campaigned for the restoration of what had been taken from her and hers, as Royalists, and for the supply of what, as a woman, had never been available to her. These variously enabling and disabling factors pivoted around Cavendish’s mutually supportive marriage – a partnership which she continually figured as the generative Utopian space of her own productivity – but her writing raises the question of the relation of women to restoration in general, and the Restoration in particular.

Cavendish’s response to the narrow territory with which women were supposed to concern themselves was a desire for encyclopaedic coverage. This will to inclusiveness has often been used as proof of her unsound scholarship and unbecoming lack of modesty. Her scientific speculations have been routinely ridiculed, but Lisa Sarasohn has shown that Cavendish’s secular atomism and, later, extreme materialism were not implausible or disreputable in their historical context. Sarasohn argues that the combination, in Cavendish’s avowedly speculative writing, of skepticism and gender critique ‘shows how the radical implications of one area of thought can reinforce and strengthen the subversive tendencies of another, quite different attack on authority’ (Sarasohn, p. 290).

Both ‘The Contract’ and ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ first appeared in Nature’s Pictures drawn by Fancy’s Pencil to the Life (1656). This is Cavendish’s most ambitious attempt to combine modes and genres, as the title page indicates: ‘In this volume there are several feigned stories of natural descriptions, as comical, tragical, tragi-comical, poetical, romancical, philosophical, and historical, both in prose and verse, some all verse, some all prose, some mixed, partly prose, and partly verse. Also, there are some morals, and some dialogues; but they are as the advantage loaves of bread to a baker’s dozen; and a true story at the latter end, wherein there is no feignings.’ The whole volume runs to almost 400 closely printed pages, beginning with six prefatory addresses to the reader. The closing epistle, ‘A Complaint and Request’, specifically addresses the reader acquainted not only with this book but Cavendish’s publications to date. In this, her fifth book issued in three years, she assumes a continuing audience for her work: those implied readers whose existence confirms her career as a writer in a public sense.

Both stories from Nature’s Pictures included here concern the eventual marriage of a young and wealthy heroine to a younger brother whose fortune is made by the death of the first heir. Both men, initially married to wealthy, older widows, are offered as desirable and sexually libertine. The narrative denouement requires the removal of the present wife, respectively through annulment and death, and the reform of the rakish husband by the virtuous, beautiful and brilliantly accomplished heroine. William Cavendish was just such a dissolute and successful younger brother, whom Margaret Cavendish married after the death of his first wife, a rich widow. Clearly Margaret Cavendish was rewriting the narrative of her own history as romance, focusing her main attention and admiration on the advantageous production of woman as spectacle. In particular she charts the difficult progress of the exceptional, and exceptionally chaste, woman to her just reward: a brilliant marriage and her own title.

Cavendish was pointedly censorious about the deleterious effects of romance on the minds and conduct of female readers. The heroine’s guardian in ‘The Contract’ ‘never suffered her to read in Romancies, nor such light books’ (p. 185), while Miseria, the heroine of ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’, refuses to read romances; choosing mathematical treatises instead. Cavendish herself claimed never to have read romances, but did not scruple to write what she called ‘romancical’ books. Her own experiments with the feminized romance mode dramatize women’s sexualized access to power through marriage and eroticized friendship.17 Similarly, they play out the empowering possibilities of disguise or masking, allowing women the opportunity to excel in literally masculine or masculinized roles (Empress, Viceregent, General, legal advocate, ‘son’).

Cavendish repeatedly feminizes the aristocratic and chivalric trope (or figure) of the fair unknown. In her stories, the woman as stranger effortlessly and instantaneously seduces all who encounter her, and is able to profit by the recognition of her own status as fetish. These narratives centre on the strangeness of woman, both inherent and circumstantial, and her ability to solicit and shape ‘the gaze of wonder’.18 Though her plots lead to, or hinge on, advantageous marriage, each of these stories also privileges relations between women as asymmetrical doubles. An adversarial contest between current and future wives forms the climax of ‘The Contract’, while eroticized platonic love and female patronage are crucial to ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ and The Blazing World.

In ‘The Contract’, an orphaned infant heiress is brought up by her father’s brother, whose own children are dead.