The extraordinary life of 17th-century polymath Margaret Cavendish

Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century Duchess of Newcastle, has been described as a heroine whose every doing ‘is romantic’ (Samuel Pepys); as being ‘so distracted… that there are many soberer people in Bedlam’ (Lady Dorothy Temple); as looking like ‘a devil in a phantom masquerade’ (King Charles II); as ‘the great atheistical philosophraster’ (anonymous 17th-century gossip writer); as ‘a picture of foolish nobility’ (Horace Walpole); as ‘a giant cucumber’ (Virginia Woolf); as a ‘crack-brained, bird-witted… fantastical… crazy duchess’ (Woolf again) and as ‘the empress and authoress of a whole world’ (herself). She has been seen as that most tiresome of types, a ‘character’. But in this erudite and entertaining book, Francesca Peacock makes a persuasive case for her being, as well, an author whose work is as illuminating as it is unconventional.

Margaret loved to make a spectacle of herself. Peacock begins with a visit she made to London in 1667. She attended the opening of one of her plays, arriving in a chariot drawn by eight white bulls, with her breasts bared and her nipples painted scarlet.