Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Margaret Cavendish
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Standard Name: Cavendish, Margaret
Birth Name: Margaret Lucas
Married Name: Margaret Cavendish
Titled: Margaret Cavendish, Marchioness of Newcastle
Titled: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle
Used Form: The Lady M. of Newcastle
Used Form: The Lady Marchioness of Newcastle
Used Form: The Lady Margaret Countesse of Newcastle
Used Form: The Lady Newcastle
Margaret Cavendish, who was by marriage a great lady, wrote in the seventeenth century primarily to please herself and her husband, who was an enthusiast for her writing; they took pleasure in her publishing as well as her writing. Her works (scientific speculations, poems, plays, speeches, biography and autobiography) were issued in handsome folio volumes, with her name and some honorific description, primarily for presentation more than for sale. Two women printers published works by her.
Bell, Maureen. A Dictionary of Women in the London Book Trade, 1540-1730. Loughborough University of Technology, 1983.
Lady Jane's father's second wife, Margaret Cavendish
, was by several years the younger of the two, and at first Jane may have seen or heard of the woman who became her stepmother as shy...
Textual Features
Lady Jane Cavendish
A specific crux in criticism of The Concealed Fansyes has been the question of whether Lady Tranquillity is a portrait of Margaret Cavendish
. This question is bound up with that of date: William Cavendish...
Literary responses
Lady Jane Cavendish
Thomas Lawrence
, in his elegy, aspires to inherit LJC
's poetic gift, by seizing her discarded mantle (as Elisha in the Bible did the prophet's mantle of Elijah). In view of recent critical debate...
Textual Features
Dinah Mulock Craik
Despite her regular invocation of conventional gender roles, DMC
, like Felicia Hemans
before her, considers alternative views of heroic male effort in poems such as her later The Arctic Exploration: from the Woman's Side...
Textual Features
Susan Du Verger
An epistle dedicatory to Cavendish
explains that the writer just happened upon a copy of this delicious and exquisite book
Du Verger, Susan. Du Vergers Humble Reflections. 1657.
prelims
and devoured it (continuing Cavendish's own metaphor) with the utmost delight, particularly because it...
Textual Production
Susan Du Verger
Two years after Margaret Cavendish
published The World's Olio, translator SDV
issued a critique: Du Vergers Humble Reflections upon some Passages of the Right Honorable the Lady Marchionesse of Newcastles Olio.
English Short Title Catalogue. http://estc.bl.uk/.
Author summary
Susan Du Verger
SDV
published between 1639 and 1653 two translations of fiction (the first a collection of early novels or romances) and an unusual critique of a work by Margaret Cavendish, then Marchioness of Newcastle
.
Literary...
Friends, Associates
Anne Finch
AF
enjoyed personal friendships with a number of distinguished men, among them Bishop Thomas Ken
. She valued female friendship very highly; women friends figure prominently in her poetry. Lady Catherine Jones
, to whom...
Family and Intimate relationships
Antonia Fraser
All three generations of women are seen combining in the Elizabeth Longford
Prize for Historical Biography, given in affectionate memory of the grandmother, and awarded in 2004 by judges Antonia and Flora Fraser (mother and...
LH
wrote so that her children might learn about their father's life; she was also mindful of her husband's dying injunction to her to shew her selfe in this occasion a good christian, and above...
Residence
Lady Ottoline Morrell
At this point the child Ottoline Bentinck moved with her immediate family from East Court in Berkshire, a country house without claims to unusual historical or aesthetic interest, to Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire...
Family and Intimate relationships
Lady Ottoline Morrell
LOM
was always especially proud of the fact that the Bentincks were descended, though not actually from the seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish
, Duchess of Newcastle (who had no children), at least from the family...
Leisure and Society
Lady Ottoline Morrell
Her salon began with entertainments for her husband's political colleagues, but she expanded it to include a remarkable range of guests, especially writers, painters, poets, dancers, and critics. Her at homes on Thursday evenings soon...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho
, the patriotic heroism...
