The Blazing World and Other Writings (Penguin Classics) (4 page)

Cavendish’s narratives of female virtue rewarded are supplemented by complex authorial commentaries or meta-narratives. Through them she addresses the reader who, located in the world beyond the text, necessarily escapes her control. It is this extratextual, historically unspecific and mobile relation which constitutes the most important seduction of all, for it is the gaze of the reader which will guarantee the Utopian viability of the author’s signature, outside me closed system of the library catalogue or publisher’s list. My role as editor and introducer adds another level to this recursive process of female collaboration. On behalf of, and in the spirit of, Cavendish’s own authorial interventions and ambitions, this collection solicits new readers and new readings.

¹
Virginia Woolf, ‘The Duchess of Newcastle’ [1925], in
Virginia Woolf, Women and Writing
, ed. Michele Barrett, London: The Women’s Press, 1979, 79.

²
See Patricia Crawford’s invaluable, ‘Women’s Published Writings 1600–1700’, in
Women in English Society 1500–1800
, ed. Mary Prior, London: Methuen, 1985, 211–82. The only comparable figure is Aphra Behn, whose first play was produced in London in 1670. On sixteenth and early seventeenth century women’s writing, see Elaine V. Beilin,
Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance
, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, and Ann Rosalind Jones,
The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric 1520–1640
, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

³
For Cavendish’s relation to the new science see Lisa Sarasohn, ‘A Science Turned Upside Down : Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish’,
Huntington Library Quarterly
47 (1984), 289–307, Sylvia Bowerbank, ‘The Spider’s Delight: Margaret Cavendish and the “Female” Imagination’ in
Women in the Renaissance
, eds K. Farrell, E.H. Hageman, A.F. Kinney, Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 187–203, and Gerald D. Meyer,
The Scientific Lady in England, 1650–1760
, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955, ch. 1. For a broader introduction see M. Hunter,
Science and Society in Restoration England
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. For an overview of a number of recent studies of Cavendish’s relation to the new science see Eric Lewis, ‘The Legacy of Margaret Cavendish’,
Perspectives on Science
9 (2001), 341–64.

⁴
‘A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life’, in
Nature’s Pictures
, London: A. Maxwell, 1656, 368–391. ‘A True Relation’ was dropped from the second edition of 1671, presumably because its authenticating function was no longer considered necessary. On Cavendish and autobiography see Dolores Paloma, ‘Margaret Cavendish: Defining the Female Self,
Women’s Studies
7 (1980), 55–66, and Mary Beth Rose, ‘Gender, Genre and History: Seventeenth-Century English Women and the Art of Autobiography’, in
Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
, ed. Mary Beth Rose, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986, 245–78.

⁵
On Cavendish’s drama see Sophie Tomlinson, ‘“My Brain the Stage”: Margaret Cavendish and the Fantasy of Female Performance’, in
Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760
, eds Clare Brant and Diane
Purkiss, London: Routledge, 1992, and Susan J. 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.

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.

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. 1659).

1642 Outbreak of Civil War. Theatres closed.

Lucas family move to Royalist base at Oxford.

1643 Margaret becomes Maid of Honour to Henrietta Maria, Oxford.

1644 Henrietta Maria escapes to Paris, Margaret attending. Battle of Marston Moor: William Cavendish into exile. John Milton,
Areopagitica.

1645 Margaret m. William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle (b.1593) in Paris.

1646 End of First Civil War.

1647 Margaret’s sister Mary Lucas Killigrew and mother, Elizabeth Leighton Lucas, the of natural causes; her brother Sir Charles Lucas executed (with Sir George Lisle) and the family tomb broken open.

1648 Second Civil War. Newcastles move to Antwerp.

1649
30 January:
Trial and Execution of Charles 1. Commonwealth declared.

14 March:
Newcastle banished, estates confiscated.

Gerrard Winstanley,
The True Leveller’s Standard.

1650 Descartes dies. Anne Bradstreet,
The Tenth Muse.

1651
November:
Margaret to London with her brother-in-law, Charles Cavendish.

December:
Unsuccessful petition to sequestration committee.

Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan.

1653 Cromwell declared Lord Protector.

Early March:
Margaret returns to Antwerp.

Late March:
Publishes
Poems and Fancies.

May:
Publishes
Philosophical Fancies.

Ann Collins,
Divine Songs and Meditations.

1654 Charles Cavendish dies. Anna Trapnel,
The Cry of a Stone.

1655 Margaret publishes
The World’s Olio
and
Philosophical and Physical Opinions.

1656 Margaret publishes
Nature’s Pictures.
James Harrington,
Oceana.

1660 Restoration of monarchy and House of Lords.

Newcastles return to England, retire to Welbeck, Nott.

Theatres reopen. Royal Society founded.

1661 Coronation of Charles II. Anne Finch born.

1662 Margaret publishes
Orations of Divers Sorts
and
Plays.

1663 Revised
Philosophical and Physical Opinions
issued.

1664 Margaret publishes
Sociable Letters
and
Philosophical Letters.

1665 Newcastle made Duke by Charles II.

Robert Hooke,
Micrographia.
The Great Plague.

1666
Observations on Experimental Philosophy
with
The Blazing World.

Margaret Fell,
Womens Speaking Justified.
Great Fire of London.

1667 Margaret publishes
Life of William Cavendish
, visits Royal Society.

Katherine Philips,
Collected Poems
(posth.). Milton,
Paradise Lost.

1668 Reissues of
Observations
plus
Blazing World, Orations of Divers Sorts, Grounds of Natural Philosophy, Poems or Several Fancies;
first publication,
Plays never Before Printed.

1670 Behn’s first play,
The Forced Marriage
produced.

1671 Reissues of
The World’s Olio
and
Nature’s Pictures.

1673
15 December:
Margaret dies.

1674
7 January:
Buried in Westminster Abbey. Her sisters, Lady Pye and Anne Lucas chief mourners.

Bathsua Makin,
An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen.

1675
Life of William Cavendish
reissued. Greenwich Observatory opened.

1676 Newcastle dies, interred beside Margaret.

Letters and Poems in Honour of the incomparable Princess Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle
, ed. William Cavendish.