Sociable Letters Research Articles

Resurrection Reading: Margaret Cavendish Drafts the Afterlife

Margaret Cavendish’s quest for intellectual and literary fame garnered infamy during her own lifetime—so she extended her pursuit of favorable renown into the afterlife, envisioning “a glorious resurrection in following ages” (“To the Two Universities,” in Philosophical and Physical Opinions [1655]). She sought to impart a residue of herself in her texts which could then be reanimated in the minds of readers: “I am industrious,” she declares, in Sociable Letters (1664), “to do some Work, wherein I may leave my Idea, or live in an idea, or my Idea may Live in Many Brains.” This essay situates Cavendish’s vision of living in the “many brains” of future readers within both her natural philosophical and fictional works. From the notions of perception, conception, and the composition of matter put forth in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), I extrapolate a theory of reading consonant with Cavendish’s vitalist-materialist worldview. From the speculative appendix of her Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), I piece together a theory of resurrection and the mechanisms by which a fully material authorial afterlife might plausibly arise. These operations remain tentative in Cavendish’s explicitly scientific works, but they are more centrally enacted in her fictional Blazing World (co-published with Observations in 1666). I suggest that this text’s famously baffling scenes of soul-swapping, body-hopping, and world-building coalesce in modeling the kind of vulnerable authorship, collaborative readership, and intersubjective relationships that could produce the “glorious resurrection” in the minds of others to which Cavendish aspires. [S.R.]

Letter Matters: Corporeality, Physicality, Epistolarity

:During the English Restoration, the writing of letters took on new significance, and the formal tradition of letter writing contributed significantly to the experimentation that played out within the genres of narrative prose fiction. While epistolarity is built on the absence of speakers, merely evoking their spectral presence during the moment of reading, materiality nevertheless finds its way into these indirect forms of communication. In fact, corporeality and the physicality of objects included in letters could be said to make up for the absent body of the speaker. This article discusses how Restoration epistolarity employs such forms of materiality, arguing that readers and writers, both within the diegetic realm and in actual reality, decoded ostentatious moments of materiality as acts that lent letters an element of veracity and reliability that this generic form was not usually able to claim at this particular historical moment. Texts studied include Robert Beaumont's Loves Missives to Virtue (1660) and Margaret Cavendish's Sociable Letters (1664).

Unconventional Experiments: Teaching Early Modern Women Writers

Abstract: This article discusses an approach to teaching early modern women's writing that uses book history and formalism as its main tools. It argues that digital editions of the poetry of Mary Wroth, Hester Pulter, and Margaret Cavendish enable new ways to study these works. Paul Salzman's Wroth edition places different versions of the same poem (including digitized images of the holograph manuscript) side by side, which shows how a misreading of her first sonnet occurred. The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making is producing multiple editions of Hester Pulter's 120 poems, plus additional "curations" that bring contextual materials, including poems by male writers, into dialogue with the poems. Close readings of Pulter's poems demonstrate a poet of formal sophistication. Liza Blake's edition of Margaret Cavendish's Poems and Fancies highlights material issues by offering detailed textual notes that compare the three very different printed versions. Her digital edition also suggests pathways for formalist analysis, such as proposing Cavendish as a metaphysical poet, as does the work of Lara Dodds, which suggests we embrace Cavendish's supposed "bad writing." After a brief analysis of Cavendish's generically experimental Sociable Letters , this article turns to a recent example of recovery research in the discovery of Dorothy Calthorpe's manuscripts and ends by suggesting future trends in the field. These include analyzing known works from multiple perspectives and studying a wider range of sources that more accurately reflects early modern conceptions of authorship.

Canonizing Margaret Cavendish: On the Creation of a Cult and Its Idol

ABSTRACTIn the commemorative A Collection of Letters and Poems (1678), friends of Margaret Cavendish compare her thoughts to miracles, her texts to shrines, and her person to a nun. This essay argues that testimonials such as these represent the responses of willing participants in Cavendish’s fantasy about her own saintly status. Upholding the outward form of religion but not the substance, she seeks to establish her own cult of personality, whose members contribute new headspaces to serve as shrines for her iconographic, meme-like images. Rather than heaven, Cavendish seeks to be glorified in our heads in the here and now, trading transcendence for immanence as she attempts to “Live … in all Ages, and in every Brain” (Sociable Letters, 178). Her texts not only flirt with idolatry; they actively promote it by encouraging us to worship our mental images of her as solitary saint.

Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish: Civil War and Enemy Commiseration

Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681) and Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), prolific writers from the seventeenth century, came of age in one of the most difficult times in British history. Blair Worden, an eminent historian, writes, “The political upheaval of the mid-seventeenth century has no parallel in English history,” and none of the previous conflicts “has been so far-reaching, or has disrupted so many lives for so long, or has so imprinted itself on the nation’s memory” (2009, p. 1). Hutchinson and her husband, John, were on the side of the parliamentarians in the Civil War while Cavendish and her husband, William, were stout royalists. Instead of showing aggressive stances against their enemies, Hutchinson and Cavendish engaged expansively in a language of empathizing with the enemy in order to lessen the extreme partisanship of that period. Focusing specifically on Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel John Hutchinson, and Cavendish’s Sociable Letters, among other writings, I argue that during the political impasse which characterized the English Civil War writings, the perspectives advanced by Hutchinson and Cavendish highlight the valuation of human life regardless of political allegiance, augmenting the odds for peaceful co-existence, in which empathy is foregrounded over, and at times alongside, loss and agony as a result of the Civil War aftermath. Suzanne Keen’s groundbreaking research in Empathy and The Novel draws upon examples from the Victorian period to illustrate her understanding of empathy, but she also states that “I feel sure they also pertain to the hopes of authors in earlier periods as well” (2007, p. 142), which is a position taken wholeheartedly in this article. Using a cognitive literary approach where authorial empathic constructions are analyzed, Hutchinson’s and Cavendish’s closely read texts portray an undeniable level of commiseration with the enemy with the goal of abating violence and increasing cooperation and understanding.

The blurring of genus, genre, and gender in Margaret Cavendish’s utopias

The Blazing World was the first utopia in English written by a woman, and likely, the first science fiction text in English. Yet it was not Margaret Cavendish’s only utopic text. The separatist spaces of her plays, and the virtual communities of her epistolary collections, were earlier utopias that contributed to her construction of Blazing World. Cavendish established the characteristics of utopian literature through the transgression of categories and hybridity. I consider her blurring of genus, genre and gender in two of her utopic texts, Sociable Letters and Blazing World, and her strategic development of the blurring of these categories.

Lucretia and the Impossibility of Female Republicanism in Margaret Cavendish'sSociable Letters

Margaret Cavendish is known for her personal allegiance to monarchy in England. This is reflected in her writings; as Hobbes did, she tended to criticize severely any attempt at rebellion and did not think England could become a republic. Yet it seems that Cavendish did have sympathy with some republican values, in particular, as Lisa Walters has argued, with the republican concept of freedom as nondomination. How can we explain this apparent inconsistency? I believe that the answer lies in a lack of fit between the republican theories that were available to her and the values she accepted and according to which she was expected to live her life.

Intimate Correspondence: Negotiating the Materials of Female Friendship in Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters

ABSTRACTMargaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters is often foreclosed from scholarship on early modern epistolary culture because of its status as a printed, published letter collection written to an imaginary interlocutor. This article seeks to remedy that foreclosure by arguing that Cavendish uses Sociable Letters, and the female friendship within its pages, to intervene in epistolary traditions and negotiate alternatives for the conventional markers of intimacy between correspondents. Grounding the argument in various models of early modern epistles and current scholarly debates on familiar letter conventions, the author demonstrates that Cavendish both capitalizes on and manipulates the standard temporal structures of epistolary exchange. Through a close analysis of several letters in the collection, the author finds that memory and shared personal history emerge as key components to Cavendish’s proposed modes of intimacy. Ultimately, the fictional friendship between female correspondents in Sociable Letters contributes provocative new insights to scholarly arguments on Cavendish's authorial mode, and discussions on early modern letters and the relationships scripted within their pages.

‘Perswade us out of our selves’: Margaret Cavendish’s regulation of rhetoric

ABSTRACTIn works like The World’s Olio, Sociable Letters and Orations of a Divers Sort, Margaret Cavendish aspires to a rhetorical tradition from which she, as a woman, is excluded. However, Cavendish’s aspirations are tempered by her anxiety toward rhetoric and its masculine histories, legacies and protocols, which poses a threat to Cavendish’s insistent self-fashioning as “Margaret the First”, an autonomous figure characterized by an eccentric defiance. Particularly in her Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy to which is Added the Description of a New Blazing World, Cavendish presents fantasies of containment and regulation, in which masculine voices are corrected and silenced by an authoritative female voice. Rooted in emerging theories of political and epistemological unification, Cavendish’s gestures toward difference is tempered by a fear of political instability and a more anxious possibility that it might “perswade [her] out of [herself]”. Cavendish constructs the autonomous and safeguarded space where she can best protect herself from that powerful threat of language. The symbolic exclusions and relocations of rhetoric allow Cavendish both to imagine and protect her exceptionalism.

Letter Writing, the Imagined Female Discursive Community and Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters

Letter Writing, the Imagined Female Discursive Community and Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters

Epistolary Community in Print, 1580-1664 by Diana G. Barnes (review)

Reviewed by: Epistolary Community in Print, 1580-1664 by Diana G. Barnes Frank Swannack Barnes, Diana G. , Epistolary Community in Print, 1580-1664 (Material Readings in Early Modern Culture), Farnham, Ashgate, 2013; hardback; pp. 262; 11 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £55.00; ISBN 9781409445357. Diana G. Barnes introduces her fascinating study with correspondence between Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey. She uses their dialogue to argue that epistolary discourse 'is a sociable form that speaks for the group rather than the individual' (p. 1). Thus, Barnes examines early modern letters that have 'appeared at key moments from the 1580s to the 1660s' with the wider community in mind (p. 15). During these periods of political upheaval, letter-writers attempted to influence public opinion. Chapter 1 examines The English Secretary (1586-1635) by Angel Day. This manual for professional letter-writers also reveals Barnes's additional interest in the importance of 'feminine' letters written by women. It appears an obvious concern given how the figure of 'the secretary' has been distinctly feminised in modern times. Barnes's analysis of the literacy women demonstrated by the reading and writing of letters is here used to chart the development of love letters. Yet Barnes's analysis is also crucial for understanding how women came to define the epistolary tradition. Michael Drayton's England's Heroicall Epistles (1597) is the subject of Chapter 2. Influenced by the epistles in Ovid's Heroides, Drayton's dialogue form uses love letters 'to challenge singular sovereignty' (p. 69). The king's disgruntled mistresses turned feminine discourse into a powerful political weapon. These epistolary dialogues lead Barnes neatly into a discussion of Jacques du Bosque's The Secretary of Ladies (1638), the subject of Chapter 3. Translated by Jerome Hainhofer and dedicated to Mary Sackville, The Secretary of Ladies invited contemporary concerns into Henrietta Maria's Roman Catholic court. Barnes argues more specifically that feminine epistolary discourse was not private, but 'a differentiating and specifying term in a public discourse' (p. 75). The early modern appetite for gossip within the aristocratic elite sets the tone for the next chapter. Chapter 4, provocatively titled 'Epistolary Battles in the English Civil War: The Kings Cabinet Opened (1645)', details how Parliament turned the public against King Charles I. Once the New Model Army had seized and published the King's private letters, Charles's ability to rule was open to public debate. Barnes reveals a dichotomy where the King was associated 'with secret language, deception and sin' and Parliament 'with plain prose, God and truth' (p. 113). More interesting is the assertion that the King was ruled by an 'evil secretary' through the Queen's ability to manipulate language (p. 128): femininity was no longer associated with love letters but with political controversy. In order to restore a positive attitude towards feminine discourse, Chapter 5 tackles Margaret Cavendish's Sociable Letters and Philosophical [End Page 163] Letters (1664). Sociable Letters contains letters promoting marital bliss. The wife of this epistolary discourse is not deceptive, but instead 'sets ideals and restores peace' (p. 157). Philosophical Letters is an extension of Cavendish's rhetoric of friendship and love. It was a serious attempt by a woman to voice philosophical opinion in a distinctly male world. Cavendish's discussion of the leading philosophers of the day, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Henry More, Francis Mercury Van Helmont, and Galileo Galilei demonstrates this male preserve set against her own philosophy. In the Conclusion, Barnes reiterates the social function of what she terms 'the printed familiar letter' (p. 197).The individual voice was still retained but, upon publication, the printed letter became a communal discourse through its wide familiarity. Yet Barnes also identifies the exclusionary nature of the epistolary tradition. Referring once again to the Spenser/Harvey letters, she reflects how the 'familiar printed letter' is hostile to the unfamiliar other. Epistolary Community in Print, 1580-1664 is an excellent study for students and academics interested in the early modern letter-writing tradition. Barnes's focus on feminine epistolary discourse gives her book welcome depth. Her book is also an exciting read. Each subsequent chapter follows a logical progression to create an absorbing narrative that celebrates...

Margaret Cavendish, Richard Flecknoe, and Raillery at the Salon of Beatrix de Cusance

This essay explores the distinction between “gentil” and piquant raillery as found at the salon of Beatrix of Cusance, Duchess of Lorraine, as described in two volumes written by Richard Flecknoe ( A Treatise of the Sports of Wit and Additional Epigrams of the Year 1674), and as transformed in Margaret Cavendish's The World's Olio, Nature's Pictures , and Sociable Letters. Piquant raillery involved semi-serious personal attacks and mild bawdry, while “gentil” raillery was more tame. Both sorts of raillery, as Flecknoe explains, are not railing; that is, raillery does not betray anger. While Cavendish mostly engages in raillery, she does slip into railing in her prefaces on occasion.

Reading and Writing inSociable Letters; Or, How Margaret Cavendish Read Her Plutarch

AbstractMargaret Cavendish's Sociable Letters (1664), a fictionalized collection of private letters, makes reading and writing its subject in the broadest possible sense. Individual letters in the collection frequently offer commentary on books and describe the reading practices of women and men. This essay argues that Sociable Letters can be read as a case study of the conditions of women's reading practices. In Sociable Letters Cavendish demonstrates both an awareness of gendered models of reading and a strategic reclamation of the desiring female reader. Epistolarity becomes a means for some women to negotiate identities as reading subjects. More broadly, this essay suggests that Sociable Letters can contribute to a more inclusive history of early modern reading, which has often been defined in terms of a normative male reader. Cavendish's extended commentary on Plutarch's Lives offers a skeptical critique of humanist models of reading. In her responses to Plutarch's Cato and Pericles, Cavendish descri...

Bell In Campo (review)

Bell In Campo, by Margaret Cavendish Presented for the Seventh Biennial International Conference of the Margaret Cavendish Society at Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire, England. July 1, 2007. Adapted and Directed by Ian Gledhill. Production Manager Lynda Liddament. Stage Manager Richard Liddament. Assistant Stage Manager Laura Panter. Hair and Wardrobe by Jane Isher. Costumes by the English Civil War Society and Sheffield University Drama Society. With John Skevington (Lord General), Mick Connell (Monsieur la Gravity), Jonathan Jones (Monsieur Comerade), Peter Geary (Monsieur Compagnion), Steven Carter (Monsieur Ruffell), Lynda Liddament (Lady Victoria), Catherine Carter (Madam Jantil), Linda Kirk (Madam Passionate), Erica Packington (Madam Ruffell), Julia Bisby (Nell Careless), and Naomi Deaville (Doll Pacify). A highlight of attending the recent biennial meetings of the Margaret Cavendish Society has been the chance to see some of her plays performed. So far as we know, none of Cavendish's dramatic works were staged in her lifetime or after, and it is only in the last decade that a performance history has begun. Whether Cavendish wrote her plays with an expectation of live performance or only as a kind of private theatre of the mind continues to be debated in the scholarship. Regardless, many of her plays are capable of holding the boards as aesthetic objects in their own right in addition to being important documents of mid-century royalist culture. On July 1st, 2007, at the close of the seventh biennial meeting, an abridged version of Cavendish's two-part Bell in Campo was performed at Bolsover Castle, in Derbyshire, England. Bolsover Castle was Margaret Cavendish's dower house, a property specifically entailed to her should she survive William, Duke of Newcastle. The castle and grounds served as one of William's favorite places for entertainment, for instance hosting King Charles I in the summer of 1634, a visit for which Ben Jonson wrote the masque Love's Welcome to Bolsover. The performance of Bell in Campo reviewed here took place in a large building known as the Riding House, built by William in the 1630s for his horsemanship. The Riding House is a rectangular building roughly 150 by 40 feet, and nearly four stories high at its summit. Oak rafters crossed the space above the audience, and natural light flooded in from extremely large windows placed evenly throughout the long walls. These windows, all at their lowest point about ten feet above the floor (high enough, originally, so horses could not look out) kept the performance illuminated with bright natural light. The costumes and military props were courtesy of Sir William Pennyman's Regiment of the English Civil War Society, and they effectively evoked Caroline court and camp styles. The men wore black breeches, ruffled white shirts, and hats plumed with large feathers; the women wore colorful long gowns and, at times, buff coats and more casual dresses. In this beautiful early seventeenth-century building, little additional scenery was necessary; white-washed walls and dark oak beams, some recorded music, period costumes, and hand-held props served admirably to give Cavendish's imaginative closet drama a local habitation and a name. Despite its allegorical character-names and non-specific setting, Bell in Campo is a barely disguised rewriting of the experience of the civil wars of the 1640s in England. It is a kind of counterfactual history play that seeks, as it were, to restage the initial trauma of taking sides and, for royalists, the disastrous future of the hostilities in the early 1640s. At the same time, and typical of Cavendish's corpus, the play is an allusive and unstable mixture of literary genres and political ideologies, in particular those of Shakespeare's middle and late tragedies, and mid-seventeenth-century French romances centered on the deeds of heroic women. Cavendish was an avid reader of Shakespeare (he was, she wrote in Sociable Letters, one of three dead men with whom she was in love), and echoes of his plays can be found in many of her works. …

Fame, Virtue, and Government: Margaret Cavendish on Ethics and Politics

This paper offers an account of Margaret Cavendish's moral and political philosophy. In some respects Cavendish's theoury echoes Hobbes. However, although Cavendish agrees with Hobbes that morality is based on self-interest, she holds that morality derives from our natural desire for public recognition, not the desire for self-preservation. Via the desire for fame, self-love can motivate people to pursue virtue, which, for Cavendish, means establishing and maintaining a good government (in particular, absolute sovereignty). The paper explores how Cavendish thinks such a government can be established and maintained. Cavendish's account of female virtue and its connection with honor and fame is also discussed.

Tentativeness and insistence in the expression of politeness in Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters

This article explores some of the ways in which speaker subjectivity, especially the expression of tentativeness and insistence, is grammaticalized in the language of CCXI Sociable Letters, written by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1664). Specifically, I examine some semantic-pragmatic meanings that might be associated with the English modal verbs can, may and will in Cavendish’s epistolary discourse. I argue that although these verbs exhibit the syntactic properties of fully-fledged auxiliaries by this time, their modern grammatical meanings (such as future time reference) are not yet fixed, allowing the pragmatic inference of a range of speaker-meanings in the context of this text. These meanings play a role in constructing different modal stances or attitudes for Cavendish’s speaker, such as tentativeness and its converse, insistence. I am interested in how the modal verbs might be understood as contributing to the linguistic expression of politeness in these early modern epistolary essays.1

:Margaret Cavendish: Sociable Letters

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Margaret Cavendish: sociable letters

Margaret Cavendish: sociable letters