Margaret Cavendish

Margaret Cavendish was born to a prominent English aristocratic family. Because she was a girl, she did not receive the same intensive, wide-ranging education as her brothers. However, from a young age, she constantly read from her family’s extensive library and talked about academic topics with her older brother John. She joined Queen Henrietta Maria’s court as a maid of honor in 1643, and in 1644, she followed the queen into exile in France. Just one year later, she married the extremely wealthy and influential Duke of Newcastle, William Cavendish, who was also exiled in France. While they were more than 30 years apart in age and never had children, the Duke and Duchess had a deep, loving, and mutually supportive relationship. In fact, the Duke introduced the Duchess to numerous prominent philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, and the Duke and Duchess frequently collaborated on and edited one another’s writing. The Duke dedicated most of his time to breeding horses, fighting for the English monarchy, and financially supporting artists and philosophers—including his wife. For 15 years, the Cavendishes lived in Paris, Rotterdam, and Antwerp. Cavendish dedicated much of her time to writing on a wide variety of topics, in a wide variety of genres. She published her first book, Poems and Fancies, in 1653. When King Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, the Cavendishes could return to England, but the Duke found his fortune substantially diminished—by the equivalent of up to a hundred million pounds in today’s money. Still, as Cavendish explains in The Blazing World, she and her husband managed to live a relatively comfortable life. She published most of her work between 1662 and 1668, and she always insisted on publishing her books in her own name, which was extremely unusual in the 17th century. Many readers even thought that Cavendish’s husband had written her books because they didn’t believe that a woman could produce work so sophisticated. Similarly, although Cavendish was famously the first woman ever invited to the Royal Society of London, a prominent scientific society, the male scientists generally shunned and ignored her. In fact, throughout her life, she was often called “Mad Madge” because of her rambling writings and marked, eccentric sense of style. However, since the 1920s, readers and critics have started to take her work more seriously and even treat her as an important early feminist icon. She died in 1673 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.