C avendish, M argaret

Abstract

Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), was the author of a singularly large volume of work. She wrote in multiple genres, including poetry, plays, stories, letters, orations, biography, and autobiography, essays, and natural and political philosophy. Her work was published in 12 large folio volumes (not including subsequent editions), with a great deal of paratextual material that both apologized for and aggressively promoted the books it prefaced, punctuated, and concluded. She was, in a fulsome sense of the term, an author, and deeply invested in both the stature of that identity and the myriad uses of printed books. Born into the Essex gentry in 1623, Margaret Lucas was two when her father died and thereafter her mother ran the large family estate. During the English Civil Wars, the Lucas estate was plundered and (eventually) sequestered. In 1643 Margaret joined Queen Henrietta Maria's court in exile as a maid of honour, first in Oxford, and then in Paris, where she met and married her fellow exile William Cavendish, marquess of Newcastle, a widower, playwright, and former Royalist general 30 years her senior. After their marriage they lived in heavily indebted and culturally rich exile in Paris, Holland, and Antwerp. William and his brother Sir Charles Cavendish were patrons of Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, among others, and from 1648 to 1660, William and Margaret lived in the Antwerp house that had belonged to Peter Paul Rubens. During Margaret's exile, her mother, eldest brother, and favourite sister all died, and in 1648 her youngest brother, the Royalist lieutenant Sir Charles Lucas, was executed by the Parliamentarian regime. In 1651 she visited England to petition Parliament (without success) for income from her husband's sequestered estates, and there she began her publishing career. Poems and fancies , a collection of poems on natural philosophy that was also perhaps the first atomic theory of nature to be published in England, appeared in 1653 while she was still in England, and Philosophical fancies appeared shortly thereafter. Cavendish published three more books from exile: a third volume of natural philosophy, Philosophicall and physical opinions (1655), and the mixed‐genre volumes The worlds olio (1655) and Natures pictures (1656).