In later life, Margaret Cavendish’s designs on fame make her sound like Boris Johnson: here was a woman who wanted to be an “empress and authoress of the whole world”. But who knows from where this rank ambition sprang? As even her latest biographer, Francesca Peacock, admits, it’s so hard to put the two halves of this uncommon creature together: the ill-educated girl who was practically mute with shyness, and the prolific and notorious writer who, in 1667, would become the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society (an occurrence, incidentally, that would not be repeated for a couple of centuries). No wonder that in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf took the easy route out, dismissing Cavendish as “crack-brained and bird-witted”, a “crazy Duchess”, a “bogey to frighten clever girls with”.
Her best-known work is The Blazing World, a utopian prose piece that may be read as proto-science fiction (it’s available as a Penguin Classic). But this isn’t saying much. For all the claims that Peacock makes in Pure Wit for her subject’s writing and philosophical thinking, in the 21st century, her appeal for the non-scholar surely lies more in the life rather than in the work. What drama! It would make a good movie. Cavendish had the misfortune (or was it?) to be born in 1623, to a family that, once the civil war was under way, soon fell foul of the Puritans; during the siege of Colchester in 1648, her childhood home, St John’s Abbey, was stormed by the Parliamentary army. (The soldiers made their way to the vault below its chapel, where they cut the hair off of her mother and sister, and wore it mockingly, as makeshift wigs.) Luckily, by this point, Cavendish had already fled to Oxford, where Charles I had established his court, and where she would soon become a maid of honour to Queen Henrietta Maria.
