It not only celebrates Cavendish as a true figure of the scientific age but contributes to a broader understanding of the contested nature of the scientific revolution.

A Lit Hub Best Book of 2016 • One of Electric Literature's Best Novels of 2016 • An Entropy Best Book of 2016 “The duchess herself would be delighted at her resurrection in Margaret the First...Dutton expertly captures the pathos of a woman whose happiness is furrowed with the anxiety of underacknowledgment.” —Katharine Grant, The New York Times Book Review Margaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional 17th–century Duchess. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when "being a writer" was not an option open to women. As one of the Queen's attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, she was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. As the English Civil War raged on, Margaret met and married William Cavendish, who encouraged her writing and her desire for a career. After the War, her work earned her both fame and infamy in England: at the dawn of daily newspapers, she was "Mad Madge," an original tabloid celebrity. Yet Margaret was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of London—a mainstay of the Scientific Revolution—and the last for another two hundred years. Margaret the First is very much a contemporary novel set in the past. Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, it is a gorgeous and wholly new approach to imagining the life of a historical woman. "In Margaret the First, there is plenty of room for play. Dutton’s work serves to emphasize the ambiguities of archival proof, restoring historical narratives to what they have perhapsalways already been: provoking and serious fantasies,convincing reconstructions, true fictions.”—Lucy Ives, The New Yorker “Danielle Dutton engagingly embellishes the life of Margaret the First, the infamousDuchess of Newcastle–upon–Tyne.” —Vanity Fair

Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious, Margaret Cavendish was one of the seventeenth century's most striking figures: a woman who ventured into the male spheres of politics, science, philosophy and literature. The Blazing World is a highly original work: part Utopian fiction, part feminist text, it tells of a lady shipwrecked on the Blazing World where she is made Empress and uses her power to ensure that it is free of war, religious division and unfair sexual discrimination. This volume also includes The Contract, a romance in which love and law work harmoniously together, and Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, which explores the power and freedom a woman can achieve in the disguise of a man.

1666 Dystopian Science Fiction, Woman Author The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World. A Merchant travelling into a foreign Country, fell extreamly in Love with a young Lady; but being a stranger in that Nation, and beneath her, both in Birth and Wealth, he could have but little hopes of obtaining his desire; however his Love growing more and more vehement upon him, even to the slighting of all difficulties, he resolved at last to Steal her away; which he had the better opportunity to do, because her Father's house was not far from the Sea, and she often using to gather shells upon the shore accompanied not with above two to three of her servants it encouraged him the more to execute his design. Thus coming one time with a little leight Vessel, not unlike a Packet-boat, mann'd with some few Sea-men, and well victualled, for fear of some accidents, which might perhaps retard their journey, to the place where she used to repair; he forced her away...

As a reader of her literary predecessors, and as a writer who herself contributed to the emerging literary tradition, Margaret Cavendish is an extraordinary figure whose role in early modern literary history has yet to be fully acknowledged. In this study, Lara Dodds reassesses the literary invention of Cavendish--the use she makes of other writers, her own various forms of writing, and the ways in which she creates her own literary persona--to transform our understanding of Cavendish's considerable accomplishments and influence. In spite of Cavendish's claims that she did little reading whatsoever, Dodds demonstrates that the duchess was an agile, avid reader (and misreader) of other writers, all of them male, all of them now considered canonical--Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Milton, Bacon. In each chapter, Dodds discusses Cavendish's moments of reading of these authors, revealing their influence on Cavendish while also providing a lens to investigate more broadly the many literary forms--poetry, letters, fiction, drama--that Cavendish employed. Seeking a fruitful exchange between literary history and the history of reading, Dodds examines both the material and social circumstances of reading and the characteristic formal features and thematic preoccupations of Cavendish's writing in each of the major genres. Thus, not only is our view of Cavendish and her specific literary achievements enhanced, but we see too the contributions of this female reader to the emerging idea of literature in late seventeenth century England. Most previous studies of Cavendish have been preoccupied with literary biography, looking into her royalist politics, materialist natural philosophy, and ambivalent protofeminism. The Literary Invention of Margaret Cavendish is significant, then, in its focus outward from Cavendish to her most enduring and positive contributions to literary history--her revival of an expansive model of literary invention that rests uneasily, but productively, alongside a Jonsonian aesthetics of the verisimilar and a Hobbesian politics of social strife.

An eclectic collection of poetry by one of 17th century England's boldest, smartest, and independent women. Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was a groundbreaking writer—a utopian visionary, a scientist, a science-fiction pioneer. She moved in philosophical circles that included Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, and she produced startlingly modern poems unlike anything published in the seventeenth century or since, at once scientific and visionary, full of feminist passion and deep sympathy with the nonhuman world. In recent years, Cavendish has found many new admirers, and this selection of her verse by Michael Robbins is an ideal introduction to her singular poetic world.

The prolific Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) published books on natural philosophy as well as stories, plays, poems, orations, allegories, and letters. Her mature philosophical system offered a unique panpsychist theory of Nature as composed of a continuous, non-atomistic, perceiving, knowing matter. In contrast to the dominant philosophical thinking of her day, Cavendish argued that all matter has free will and can choose whether or not to follow Nature's rules. The Well-Ordered Universe explores the development of Cavendish's natural philosophy from the atomism of her 1653 poems to the panpsychist materialism of her 1668 Grounds of Natural Philosophy. Deborah Boyle argues that her natural philosophy, her medical theories, and her social and political philosophy are all informed by an underlying concern with order, regularity, and rule-following. This focus on order reveals interesting connections among apparently disparate elements of Cavendish's philosophical program, including her views on gender, on animals and the environment, and on sickness and health. Focusing on the role of order in Cavendish's philosophy also helps reveal key differences between her natural philosophy and her more conservative social and political philosophy. Cavendish believed that humans' special desire for public recognition often leads to an unruly ambition, causing humans to disrupt society in ways not seen in the rest of Nature. Thus, The Well-Ordered Universe defends Cavendish as a royalist who endorsed absolute monarchy and a rigid social hierarchy for maintaining order in human society.

Only recently have scholars begun to note Margaret Cavendish’s references to 'God,' 'spirits,' and the 'rational soul,' and little has been published in this regard. This volume addresses that scarcity by taking up the theological threads woven into Cavendish’s ideas about nature, matter, magic, governance, and social relations, with special attention given to Cavendish’s literary and philosophical works. Reflecting the lively state of Cavendish studies, God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish allows for disagreements among the contributing authors, whose readings of Cavendish sometimes vary in significant ways; and it encourages further exploration of the theological elements evident in her literary and philosophical works. Despite the diversity of thought developed here, several significant points of convergence establish a foundation for future work on Cavendish’s vision of nature, philosophy, and God. The chapters collected here enhance our understanding of the intriguing-and sometimes brilliant-contributions Cavendish made to debates about God’s place in the scientific cosmos.

Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673), led a dramatic life that brought her into contact with kings, queens, and the leading thinkers of her day. The English civil wars forced her into exile, accompanying Queen Henrietta Maria and her court to Paris. From this vantage point, she began writing voluminously, responding to the events and major intellectual movements of the mid-seventeenth century. Cavendish published twenty-three volumes in her lifetime, including plays, romances, poetry, letters, biography, and natural philosophy. In them she explored the political, scientific, and philosophical ideas of her day. While previous biographers of Cavendish have focused almost exclusively on her eccentric public behavior, Anna Battigelli is the first to explore in depth her intellectual life. She dismisses the myth of Cavendish as an isolated and lonely thinker, arguing that the role of exile was a rhetorical stance, one that allowed Cavendish to address and even criticize her world. She, like others writing during the period after the English civil wars, focused squarely on the problem of finding the proper relationship between mind and world. This volume presents Cavendish's writing self, the self she treasured above all others.