The other two texts included here are more complex, lengthy and ambitious. They extend Cavendish’s ambivalent fascination with the possibilities of romance as the scene of a woman’s heroic agency and successful negotiation of the theatres of power; and her commitment to the representation of women as subjects of desire and subjects in discourse.

‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ is an allegorical romance in which an anonymous heiress is forced from her home and family in the Kingdom of Riches by the dangers of war. Shipwrecked in the Kingdom of Sensuality, she is ‘assaulted and pursued’ by that kingdom’s married Prince, whose behaviour is by turns noble and dissolute. After shooting and wounding the Prince to preserve her honour, the young lady, now known as ‘Miseria’, is driven to a near-fatal suicide attempt. She cuts her hair and escapes dressed as a page, leaving letters signed ‘Affectionata’. Disguised as a boy named ‘Travellia’ she stows away on a ship which proves to be southward bound on a voyage of discovery. Travellia’s presence on the ship is discovered by the Captain, but her disguise remains intact.

The Captain finds in Travellia a ‘son’, she in him a ‘father’. The amorous romance plot is temporarily displaced by a filial romance and this literal ship of fortune then bears the new couple into the generic territory of the imaginary voyage while the main sexual plot is deferred. The heroine’s cross-dressing and change of name inaugurates a masculinized adventure and travel narrative, which in turns leads to an interlude in a fantastic kingdom; but the significance of Travellia’s female virtue is never forgotten as a motive-force in the construction of the plot, for it is that which rescues the Captain and his adopted ‘son’ from shipwreck and guides them into a scene of mutual wonder.

In this self-contained episode Cavendish offers an extended catalogue of curiosities which anticipates The Blazing World’s intense interest in new hybrids and mixed species, as well as the later text’s descriptive and allegorical richness. As Travellia and the Captain travel deeper into the kingdom, and further away from the scene of initial contact, the quality of the materials catalogued becomes more luxurious and the objects themselves more artful and elaborate. Even the appearance of the inhabitants alters to demonstrate a profound physical difference between subjects of different rank: unlike the men with deep purple skin and black teeth by whom they are met, ‘all those of the Royal blood, were of a different colour from the rest of the people, they were of a perfect orange colour, their hair coal black, their teeth and nails as white as milk, of a very great height, yet well shaped’. The royals also have skins ‘wrought, like the Britons’. These ornamental markings are cultural inscriptions of rank on skin which is already hierarchically colour-coded, but they also signify a primitive and decadent potential in those of greatest power which links them with the spear-carrying natives first described – for we learn that they are all cannibals, who will only accomplish true civility by means of this narrative of providential contact.

In the course of a year’s imprisonment, and at the Captain’s urging, Travellia proves her intellectual capacity by learning the language of their captors and, in a violent coup de théâtre, averts their destiny as sacrifices. Identifying herself and her ‘father’ as messengers of the gods, she embarks on a series of instructive sermons ‘forbidding vain and barbarous customs, and inhumane ceremonies … by which doctrine they were brought to be a civilized people.’

This fantastic episode establishes Travellia’s credentials as an effective ‘son’, and prepares the way for the more elaborate drama of multiple disguises and partial disclosures which ensues when the Prince re-enters the narrative. In an interim passage on an uninhabited island the Captain tells the suspicious Prince what he knows of Travellia, the Prince penetrates Travellia’s disguise, and Travellia unfolds the secret of her closeted gender to the Captain, who promptly rescues the ‘son’ who proves to be a daughter in distress.

Travellia and the Prince next meet in the service of monarchs of neighbouring countries, Amity and Amour, where they are drawn into a second plot of assaulted and pursued chastity, hinging on the unsuccessful courtship of the Queen of Amity by the King of Amour. The initial impediment is the Queen’s desire to maintain absolute sovereignty and independence, but the arrival of Travellia adds another twist to the complexities of unrequited love when the Queen chooses Travellia, the fair unknown, on the merits of beauty and character alone. As Travellia had been abducted by the Prince in the story’s beginning, now the Queen is abducted by the King, and Travellia and the Prince, unbeknownst to each other, become leaders of the armies of Amity and Amour.

With the help of the Captain’s experience Travellia proves herself an effective military strategist and an inspiring leader, until single combat between the two commanders once again exposes her fraudulent masculinity: the Prince’s long-averted sexual assault occurs in a displaced form as a sword-wound sustained in a military assault. The partial recognition scene, in which the Prince literally penetrates Travellia’s disguise, takes place on the battlefield over the heroine’s unconscious and bleeding body, but the Prince’s remorse and chivalry gives the victory to the forces of Amity while he becomes the willing prisoner of love.

Once more a series of disclosures of the truth of Travellia is set in train. The secret faithfully kept by the Captain goes with him to the grave, but Travellia’s daughterly grief affectively and grammatically prepares the way for her narrative uncloseting: ‘the young general when he came into the temple, who was clad all in mourning, only his face was seen, which appeared like the sun when it breaks through a dark and spongy cloud: their beams did shine on those watery drops that fell upon her cheeks, as banks where roses and lilies grew, there standing on a mounted pillar spake her father’s funeral speech’ (my italics). The Prince subsequently reveals Travellia’s secret, forcing her to declare herself first to the monarchs and then to the people of Amity.

The duel between Travellia and the Prince put an end to the assault and pursuit, and, in narrative terms, cleared the ground for the removal of the technical impediment to marriage: news of the death of the Prince’s wife arrives just as the loss of her (second) ‘father’ confirms Travellia’s need for another male guardian. It is the independent Queen of Amity who remains the most problematical figure. In despair she prays to Cupid and is granted a displacement of desire on to the King, and a conversion of sexual passion for Travellia into manageable platonic love i.e. Amity. Like ‘The Contract’, the double plot of ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ ends in double marriage. The King and Queen rule in Amour while the Prince and Princess rule in neighbouring Amity, Travellia acting as Viceregent by the Queen’s and the people’s request. Neither the Kingdom of Riches, nor the Kingdom of Sensuality, is ever mentioned again and Travellia’s unstable name is finally resolved in the title of ‘Princess’.

Ten years after the publication of ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’, Cavendish issued The Blazing World, a text which similarly combines elements of romance and utopia, and has sometimes been described as science fiction. Once again the genre of the imaginary voyage is linked to a plot of abduction and sexual assault. Instead of cross-dressing or masking, female freedom in this text is granted through various strategies of disembodiment and spectacular self-presentation.

The project of Utopian representation announced in the full title, The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World, involves Cavendish in a deliberate paradox, for, as she argues in Nature’s Pictures, ‘descriptions are to imitate and fancy to create; for fancy is not an imitation of nature, but a natural creation, which I take to be the true poetry: so that there is as much difference between fancy, and imitation, as between a creature and a creator’. A non-imitative or fantastic description is therefore a hermaphroditic foundation for a text.

The Blazing World is already improbably and hermaphroditically coupled with a serious treatise on natural philosophy, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, in both its printings of 1666 and 1668. In Observations Cavendish asserts that ‘Art produces hermaphroditical effects, that is, such as are partly natural, and partly artificial… [but] art itself is natural, and an effect of nature, and cannot produce anything that is beyond, or not within nature’.