Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Margaret Cavendish
-
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.
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...
Literary responses
Anne Bradstreet
This book appeared in a publisher's catalogue of 1657 listing the most marketable books in England. (The list included all the great male names, from Shakespeare
and Donne
to Crashaw
and Vaughan
, but only...
politics
Dorothy Osborne
Like all her family, DO
was a supporter of the Stuart monarchy. As a young woman under the Commonwealth, visiting to the Isle of Wight, she saved one of her brothers from serious trouble...
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...
Publishing
Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland
The full title was The Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinall of Perron, to the Answeare of the Most Excellent King of Great Britaine: Perron had published in 1620 his riposte to a letter...
Reception
Mary Oxlie
This work listed MO
as one of its Women among the moderns eminent for poetry. Phillips, nephew and pupil of John Milton
, seems quite interested in the existence of women poets. Others in his...
Reception
Brilliana, Lady Harley
After having been long admired for their picture of female heroism in time of need, BLH
's letters are now coming under scrutiny as expressions of domestic Puritan ideology and of the involvement of private...
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...
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...
Textual Features
Ann Oakley
This book covers a great deal of ground. When it turns back from Modern Problems to A Brief History of Methodology its exemplars include Margaret Cavendish
(who also provides one of three opening epigraphs), the...
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
Anna Letitia Barbauld
These are not narratives, but more like dramatised scenes from a child's daily life, with emphasis on food, play, and other pleasures. The vocabulary is limited, inessentials pared away, and the short sentences, often in...
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.
prelims
and devoured it (continuing Cavendish's own metaphor) with the utmost delight, particularly because it...
Textual Features
Madeleine de Scudéry
This work makes the association between women's agency and their public utterance, which was continued by Margaret Cavendish
in her Female Orations (in Orations of Divers Sorts, Accommodated to Divers Places, 1662).
Textual Features
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB
writes in terms of a women's tradition: for instance, she praises Barbauld
for praising Elizabeth Rowe
. She makes confident judgements and attributions (she is sure that Lady Pakington
is the real author of...
