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.
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.
152
and Ann, Lady Fanshawe
, merely as an awed reporter of the good looks...
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...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jean Plaidy
Lucy Worsley
, Chief Curator of Historical Royal Palaces, said in 2010 that her career path had been set by reading The Young Elizabeth (with a picture of Hampton Court on its cover) when she...
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
Education
Sarah, Lady Cowper
Nothing is known of SLC
's education, but it must have been both religious and relatively advanced, to account for her wide and intellectually intense reading as an adult in history, philosophy, and theology.
Kugler, Anne. Errant Plagiary: The Life and Writing of Lady Sarah Cowper, 1644-1720. Stanford University Press.
105
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).
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...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Mary Wroth
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle
, knew of Denny's attack: she quoted its last couplet in her Sociable Letters.
Roberts, Josephine A., and Lady Mary Wroth. “Introduction and Notes”. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, Louisiana State University Press, pp. 3 - 75, 219.
