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.
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. 1657.
prelims
and devoured it (continuing Cavendish's own metaphor) with the utmost delight, particularly because it...
Textual Production
Aphra Behn
The essay is reprinted by Sylvia Bowerbank
and Sara Mendelson
, editors of Margaret Cavendish
, among contextual material relevant to Cavendish's interests, as a woman's promotion of women's right of access to the new science.
Cavendish, Margaret. Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader. Editors Bowerbank, Sylvia and Sara Heller Mendelson, Broadview, 2000.
314-27
Textual Production
Susanna Wright
Another of her longer poems, The Grove, is a politically complex, proto-environmentalist statement about the destruction of forest. This fits into a mini-tradition of women's poetry about the cutting down of trees, a topic...
NA
writes frequently in the Guardian. For instance, in an article on the televising of Margaret Atwood
's The Handmaid's Tale she provides a sketch of utopian and dystopian fiction by women, from Margaret Cavendish
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/.
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Carola Oman
Of the various writing women connected with Henrietta Maria, CO
mentions Margaret Cavendish
as a serious-minded girl of literary aspirations,
Oman, Carola. Henrietta Maria. Hodder and Stoughton, 1936.
152
and Ann, Lady Fanshawe
, merely as an awed reporter of the good looks...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Lady Mary Walker
The title character, Eliza de Crui, sets the tone for discussion by writing from Brussels to Mrs Pierpont at Liège with the remark that, since it is so hard to say anything new, she will...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Lady Hester Pulter
As science, religion, and mythology meet in these poems, so do the public-political and the personal. Elegies lament both the violent deaths of royalist leaders Sir Charles Lucas
(elder brother of the poet Margaret Cavendish
