There has never previously, I believe, been a novel about Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, one of the 17th century’s foremost female authors, philosophers and eccentrics. But there have been several near misses. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando tips its cap to her: Orlando, just like Cavendish, is a feverishly imaginative, androgynous aristocrat afflicted by the ‘honourable disease’ of writing, filling folios with the speed of an addict.
Writers from Pepys to Lamb have tended her flame, as have two recent biographies. Siri Hustvedt paid extensive homage to Cavendish in her 2014 novel set in New York’s art scene, The Blazing World — a title, devotees of the Duchess will notice, appropriated from Cavendish’s fantasy novella of 1666. Not even our media’s peculiarly self-serving cultural amnesia, which so often leads to the excited reintroduction of the marginal or the female with a drumroll of discovery, could dare to call Margaret Cavendish ‘forgotten’.
Magnificent in her fantastical hats, prolix in her production (poems, plays, memoirs, dialogues, fiction) and overweening in her pride, Margaret claimed to be
as Ambitious as any of my Sex was, is, or can be; which makes, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First.
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