Wiseman, ‘Gender and Status in Dramatic Discourse: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’, in Women/Writing/History 1640–1740, eds Isobel Grundy and Susan J. Wiseman, London: Batsford, 1992.

6 As well as Sara Heller Mendelson’s elegant and condensed biography, The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies, Brighton: Harvester, 1987, there are two full-length studies: Douglas Grant’s readable and reliable, Margaret the First, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957, and Kathleen Jones, A Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, London: Bloomsbury, 1988. Other helpful overviews of Cavendish’s life and work are Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica. Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800, London: Virago, 1989, ch.3, and Marilyn L. Williamson, Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650–1750, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990, ch.1.

7 Some notable exceptions are the sympathetic, generically motivated accounts offered by B.G. MacCarthy, Women Writers: Their Contribution to the English Novel 1621–1744, Cork: Cork University Press, 1944, Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction 1558–1700, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985, ch.16, and Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–88, London: Virago, 1988. Catherine Gallagher, ‘Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England’, Genders I (1988) 24–39, offers a textually sophisticated reading of Cavendish as ‘Tory feminist’.

8 Two specialized check-lists agree on this: R.W. Gibson and J. Max Patrick, ‘Utopias and Dystopias 1500–1750’, in St. Thomas More: A Preliminary Bibliography of his Works and of Moreana to the Year 1750, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961, and Lyman Tower Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature 1516–1985: an annotated, chronological bibliography, New York: Garland, 1988. See also, Kate Lilley, ‘Blazing Worlds: Seventeenth Century Women’s Utopian Writing’, in Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760, eds Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss, London: Routledge, 1992.

9 See Gallagher, Todd, Salzman and Sarasohn. For an early, relatively favourable discussion of Cavendish as an anti-decadent prose writer see MacCarthy. Salzman includes a fully modernized and repunctuated text of The Blazing World in his valuable recent collection, An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

10 Samuel Pepys, Diary, 11 April 1667, eds Robert Latham and William Matthews, Vol.8, London: Bell and Hyman, 1974, 163.

11 It is important for Cavendish’s writing, and my own discussion, that ‘hermaphrodite’ can mean, consisting of, or combining the characteristics of, both sexes, and more generally, a person or thing combining any two opposite qualities or attributes.

12 For an account of Margaret Cavendish’s dress, see Mendelson, 46. James Fitzmaurice offers an interesting discussion of the frontispiece portraits of Cavendish as images of the ‘solitary genius as melancholic’ in ‘Fancy and the Family: Self-characterizations of Margaret Cavendish’, Huntington Library Quarterly 53 (1990), 198–209.

13 See, respectively, Bowerbank, 197–201; Mendelson, 38; MacCarthy, 131; Frank Manuel and Fritzie Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979, 7.

14 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1929], St Albans: Triad/Panther, 1979, 59–60.

15 Dorothy Osborne, Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, ed. Kingsley Hart, London: Folio Society, 58.

16 See S.I. Mintz, ‘The Duchess of Newcastle’s Visit to the Royal Society’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology (1952), 168–76.

17 On romance as ‘feminized’ see Helen Hackett, ‘“Yet tell me some such fiction”: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the “femininity” of Romance’, in Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760, eds Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss, London: Routledge, 1992, and Rosalind Ballaster, Seductive Forms, Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.

18 For a brilliantly suggestive discussion of ‘the gaze of wonder’ in relation to the blazon and the prospect see Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property, London: Methuen, 1987, ch.7.

19 The average age of first marriage for the upper landed classes in the seventeenth century was mid-twenties, according to Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1977. Some aristocratic marriage negotiations involving children are documented in Margaret J.M. Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987, 22–34. She comments that child marriages ‘can be assumed to have been extraordinary’, ‘confined to families with extensive property interests to protect’ (28).

20 Lawrence Stone shows that, although ‘odd cases are known from the late sixteenth century’, breach of contract suits ‘did not become common until about the 1670s’, Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, 86.

21 On the cult of Elizabeth, see, for instance, Frances Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century, London: Routledge, 1975; Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry, London: Thames and Hudson, 1977, and Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen, London: Routledge, 1989. On Henrietta Maria, masques and Margaret Cavendish see Tomlinson, n.5.

NOTE ON THIS EDITION

The copy-text of The Blazing World is the Harvard Library copy of the first edition (1666), which has been checked against the second edition (1668). The copy-text for ‘The Contract’ and ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ is the British Library copy of the first edition of Nature’s Pictures (1656).

Spelling has been modernized, except that some archaic or eccentric hyphenated forms have been retained because Cavendish shows a distinct preference for them. Grammar and punctuation have not been modernized or otherwise altered except where strictly necessary for sense. Any interpolations are enclosed in square brackets.

Cavendish’s extremely idiosyncratic punctuation and grammar have usually been seen as simply a function of her lack of formal education, and carelessness in overseeing the preparation and printing of her manuscripts. It seems to me important not to discount the defiance with which Cavendish treated normative writing practices at every level, and the way in which she assimilated that contempt to a gendered and elitist critique of the modish or commonplace.

In the preface to the second book of The World’s Olio (1655), Cavendish argues specifically for the transgressive potential of grammatical singularity, drawing an implicit comparison between a figure of woman and the equally specularized body of her texts:

as for the grammar part, I confess I am no scholar, and therefore understand it not, but that little I have heard of it, is enough for me to renounce it…. those that are nobly bred have no rules but honour, and honesty, and learn in the school of wisdom to understand sense, and to express themselves sensibly and freely, with a graceful negligence, not to be hidebound with nice and strict words, and set phrases, as if the wit were created in the inkhorn, and not in the brain; besides say some, should one bring up a new way of speaking, then were the former grammar of no effect… everyone may be his own grammarian, if by his natural grammar he can make his hearers understand the sense; for though there must be rules in a language to make it sociable, yet those rules may be stricter than need to be, and to be too strict makes them too unpleasant and uneasy. But language should be like garments, for though every garment hath a general cut, yet their trimmings may be different, and not go out of the fashion; so wit may place words to its own becoming, delight, and advantage…. As for wit, it is wild and fantastical, and therefore must have no set rules; for rules curb, and shackle it, and in that bondage it dies. (The World’s Olio, 1655, 94)

Clearly, for Cavendish, writing was far from innocent and her ‘fantastical’ grammar seems integral to that.

CHRONOLOGY

1623 Margaret Lucas born, youngest of eight, St John’s nr Colchester, Essex.

1625 Death of Margaret’s father, Thomas Lucas, Earl of Colchester.

Accession of Charles I; Charles m. Henrietta Maria.

1637 René Descartes, Discours sur la Methode. Ben Jonson dies.

1641 Anna van Schurman’s The Learned Maid (Leyden; trans.