Roaring Girls

There could hardly be a more depressing demonstration of the damage that systemic misogyny can do to a woman’s self-esteem. For all her bravado, every word of this sprang from her insecurities at her failings and mistakes, and she had a long way to go before she truly understood the root cause of her disadvantage. In anticipation of more accusations of intellectual theft, she added numerous epistles to her book to protest that her work was her own, that ‘my head was the forge, my thoughts the anvil to beat them out’. William was her tutor, and she his scholar, she admitted, but she had never received professional teaching from any ‘proper’ philosophers. The need to defend herself and her work would seemingly never end.

The year 1654 had been a bad one from the start: in February, the Cavendishes had received the news from England that Sir Charles had died, weakened by the fever he had caught the year before, and the effect was crushing. William had lost his brother, and Margaret a close friend, but both had lost the man they viewed as their saviour – Sir Charles had consistently lent them money and support, rescued the family estates from the Parliamentarians, even kept them from starvation. Margaret would later refer to him as ‘the preserver of my life’.[54] They owed him everything, and his loss plunged the couple into melancholy and illness.

Work was Margaret’s medicine this time, and despite the setbacks, her intellectual life was burgeoning. Friendships with scholarly types such as Constantijn Huygens allowed her to discuss her ever-expanding reading and the experiments she conducted in her laboratory, and to test her theories against other minds besides her husband’s, while every spare minute was spent writing it all down.

Her next book, Philosophical and Physical Opinions, published in 1655, expanded on earlier ideas, offering an exhaustive theory of the natural world and all its phenomena, and her prefaces and addresses reflected this growing seriousness. She dedicated the work to Oxford and Cambridge, the universities she aspired to attend but was categorically excluded from.

The publication of The World’s Olio the previous year had provoked yet more tiresome accusations that the work could not possibly be all hers, prompting Margaret to include in her prefaces increasingly irritable repudiations of the charges levelled at her by this ‘ill-natured and unbelieving age’. She was repeating herself to no effect – a woman’s word was worthless; the accusations only ceased when William weighed in on the debate in an epistle he contributed to Philosophical and Physical Opinions. It was plain to him that base prejudice was behind it all – ‘Here’s the crime,’ he stated, ‘a lady writes them, and to entrench so much upon the male prerogative is not to be forgiven’ – and at long last, Margaret was beginning to understand this too.[55] As she grew weary of the battles to gain respect and recognition for her work, her own belief in what women could achieve, and what society said they could achieve, were becoming increasingly polarised.

In her dedication to the ‘Two Universities’, she forcefully argued her new stance, asking them to accept her work ‘without a scorn, for the good encouragement of our sex, lest in time we should grow irrational as idiots’. She spoke from bitter experience when she wrote that men thought it impossible for women to acquire learning, ‘and we out of a custom of dejectedness think so too, which makes us quit all industry towards profitable knowledge’. But as her confidence in her own abilities had grown, so too had her conviction that women had ‘rational souls as well as men’, and that it was their exclusion from intellectual, civic and political life that was the source of the problem; it left women to become ‘like worms, that only live in the dull earth of ignorance … for we are kept like birds in cages, to hop up and down in our houses, not suffered to fly abroad’. Without the experience and knowledge that men had access to, it was no wonder women lacked their ‘invention’. How could they thrive when ‘we are never employed either in civil or martial affairs, our counsels are despised, and laughed at’ and ‘the best of our actions are trodden down with scorn’? And all because of ‘the over-weaning conceit men have of themselves’ and their ‘despisement of us’.[56] Well, she’d realised her mistake and found her outrage. There was no natural inferiority in women; only prejudice against them. Margaret Cavendish the proto-feminist had been born.

VIRGIN VIRAGOS

Never one to pause for breath, Margaret plunged into her next book with a newfound confidence in both herself and in women. Nature’s Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life, published in the summer of 1656, was another overwhelmingly diverse treasure chest of poems, fireside tales, animal fables, social satires and dialogues that attempted to pack in all of everyday life experience. It was her most ambitious, accomplished and visionary work yet, and the stand-out prose pieces all, in their way, offered revolutionary depictions of women.

In ‘The Matrimonial Agreement’, a woman’s powerlessness in marriage is redressed when a sceptical bride strikes a bargain with her husband: if she suspects him of adultery, she has the right to leave him and take a share of his estate with her. In ‘Ambition Preferr’ed Before Love’ the lady chooses not to marry at all, because ‘Husbands will never suffer their wives to climb [Fame’s Tower], but keep them fast lock’d in their arms, or tie them to household employments.’ And in ‘The Contract’, a morality tale in the ‘romancical’ mould, scholarly women are unashamedly celebrated in the spurned heroine who wins back her betrothed by becoming a paragon of learning and a ‘meteor of the time’.

‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ is Nature’s Pictures’ most interesting fictional offering, though – an allegorical, romance-inflected romp that illustrates the sexual hazards to which women are perpetually exposed. Featuring a gun-toting, cross-dressing, self-educated, gender-fluid heroine who finds herself shipwrecked in fantastical lands and winds up fending off a predatory Prince, outwitting some dangerous cannibals, leading an army into battle in defence of a Queen, making said Queen fall in love with her and ruling her own kingdom, it’s pretty startling stuff for its time.[57] Too timid to fire a pistol herself, Margaret was living out all her heroic fantasies by putting one in the unwavering hand of her heroine – and as the Prince advances on her with a smile, thinking it ‘a shame to be out-dared by a woman’, she shoots him without compunction. Later, when the Queen discovers her crush is a woman, Margaret even dabbles with the possibility of same-sex love – the Queen is ‘angry that she was deceived, yet still did love’. Pushing the boundaries further still, she toys with the fantasy of same-sex marriage, as the Queen concludes that ‘since I cannot marry her, and so make her my husband, I will keep her if I can, and so make her my friend’. The heroine’s revelation to her troops, meanwhile, is met with undiluted approbation and a rousing cry for equality: ‘Heaven bless you, of what sex soever you be’.

The last word, however, sadly goes to convention as the ending plucks our heroine from her boys’ clothes and puts her in a wedding dress, as the wife of her would-be rapist. It’s disconcerting to say the least, but as a woman who flirted with the tropes of masculinity herself, Margaret knew not to push the transgressive image of the warrior woman too far. Amazonian ‘virgin viragos’ had traditionally signalled social disorder and disruption – dangerous, unnatural women who rejected their femininity and threatened to throw the established order of marriage and childbearing into chaos – but Margaret had flipped the idea on its head by using her weaponised virgin not to wreak havoc, but to bring about peace and social order.[58] Behind the smokescreen of the traditional marriage plot, she could argue the subtly radical notion that breaking with prescribed gender conventions might suggest impeccable virtue in women rather than immodesty, and that masculine get-up could be a kind of armour that afforded them empowerment, freedom and safety.

These tales are significant in portraying some of the earliest fictional heroines written by a woman in English, and it’s heartening that in their intelligence, resourcefulness and courage they flouted all the tired rules of femininity and achieved a level of agency that their female audience could only dream of. And Margaret undoubtedly did dream of this stuff. She didn’t fantasise about heroes who would come along to rescue her; she fantasised about being a heroic woman who could rescue herself. With so many autobiographical details filtering into these tales – perilous voyages from home, exile in a foreign land, men whose first wives are conveniently dispatched and whose libertinism is reformed by the love of a virtuous young woman – it’s clear that Margaret was rewriting her own life as a romance adventure, and casting herself in the highly unconventional lead role.

If Margaret’s reinvention of herself as a fictional heroine was ambitious, the inclusion in Nature’s Pictures of her real-life autobiography was positively groundbreaking. Nothing quite like it had ever been published in English by a woman before. Their life writing had previously been either for private consumption or with a religious focus; ordinary, secular female existence was deemed unworthy of public attention. But Margaret begged to differ. At the age of just 33, in ‘A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life’, she set down her life story for posterity.

Aware that she was yet again straying from the well-trodden path, she had her defence ready. Vanity would be the first accusation, but others had done it without censure, so why shouldn’t she? Some readers would consider it presumptuous, and wonder why she had written it all, ‘since none cares to know whose daughter she was, or whose wife she is, or how she was bred, or what fortunes she had, or how she lived, or what humour or disposition she was of’. Her answer to this was simple and unashamed: granted, it might be of no interest or purpose to the reader, ‘but it is to the authoress, because I write it for my own sake, not theirs’. Here was a woman who freely admitted that her ambition (which ‘inclines to vain-glory’) was so great that she always had one eye on her legacy, aiming ‘to tell the truth, lest after-ages should mistake, in not knowing’.[59]

This was a fine claim, but like all autobiographies Margaret’s account was highly partial, glorifying her family as courageous, innocent victims of the Parliamentarians, and herself as a shy, melancholic writer who, despite her singularity and ambition, was a dutiful wife and loyal subject. For all her own spin-doctoring, however, here was also a prime opportunity to combat other people’s; to publicly answer some of the gossip and exaggerations that had a habit of springing up around her. She slapped down the rumours that she had stood ‘as a beggar at the Parliament door’ and ‘haunt[ed] the committees’ during her trip to England, and scoffed that ‘report did dress me in a hundred several fashions’. In producing this pioneering account of herself and attempting to set the record straight, Margaret was presciently asserting that women as well as men had a right to self-representation, to tell their own story as they wished, rather than languish at the mercy of other people’s interpretations.

THE RETURN OF THE KING

By 1656, Margaret had been writing continuously for four years, but then suddenly the stream of publications stopped. ‘My wit is drawn dry,’ she admitted later,[60] though a lack of funds may also have been to blame. Just as her writing juddered to a halt, however, the political situation began to shift. Charles II had been living in Germany, but when an offer of support came in from the Spanish government, he moved his court to Brussels and tried to rustle up some rebellions in England. None of them amounted to much; in the end, the Royalists’ plans had little impact compared with the death of Oliver Cromwell in September 1658 and the abdication of his son Richard as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth in May the following year. The Royalists had the power vacuum they needed, and in the chaos that ensued, the old stability of the monarchy began to look appealing once more. Negotiations with Charles began, and on 25 April 1660, Parliament voted unanimously for the return of the King. On hearing of the May Day celebrations, Samuel Pepys – once ‘a great roundhead’ in his youth[61] – reported dryly that there was ‘great joy all yesterday at London, and at night more bonfires than ever, and ringing of bells, and drinking the King’s health upon their knees in the streets, which methinks is a little too much’.[62]

The country’s raptures continued when Charles arrived back in England on 26 May. William was so desperate to join his king that he followed in a rickety old boat that was barely seaworthy, and was overcome with emotion on his return home: ‘Surely … I have been sixteen years asleep, and am not thoroughly awake yet,’ he gushed.[63] For the time being Margaret had to remain in Antwerp as surety for William’s debts, and in her absence England banished Puritanism and roared back to life. William hastily joined the queue of Lords who in August were presenting private bills for the reparation of their losses, and once he’d received royal assent, was finally able to borrow the money to release his wife and start paying off his debts.

When Margaret did finally return home, she wasn’t quite as delighted with what she found as William had been. Despite her relief that her exile was over, her husband was still living in reduced circumstances in London, unrewarded by the King for his loyalty, while others had been showered with honours. It fell to his children to step in with financial help this time until he managed to claw back the rest of his scattered estates in September. That same month, however, his devotion to the King was at last rewarded with a decent position at court, as Gentleman of the Bedchamber, and the important salaried role of Lord Lieutenant of Nottingham.

Finances back on track, William announced that he and his wife would be settling in his Midlands estates of Welbeck, 20 miles from Nottingham, and Bolsover Castle, in Derbyshire. Margaret, who had never felt much at ease in garrulous urban society, was happy to retire to a quiet life in the country, though she and her husband would both be in for a shock when they arrived that autumn. William’s parks had been uprooted, his livestock killed, his houses looted, and Bolsover Castle – occupied, garrisoned and part-demolished – was a ruin. Margaret later worked out her husband’s financial losses to be a whopping £941,303.

It would take more loans and a grand restoration project, but within two years Welbeck, at least, had risen from the ashes and William was finally in a position to secure Margaret’s jointure.[64] In the event of his death, he now granted his wife numerous properties, a yearly income of £1,025 and a life interest in Bolsover Castle, and over the next few years he would add even more to this inheritance – much to the consternation of his children.

In her new life in the country, Margaret tried to apply herself to housewifery, but despite an aptitude for elements of estate management (just like her mother), the lure of returning to writing became too great, and in 1662 she embarked on another publishing binge. First came a collection of plays that had been waiting patiently in her desk drawer since her days in Antwerp. Written when the English theatres were closed, and ignoring all the rules of standard drama, these plays were unlikely ever to be performed. Often long and oddly structured, chopping and changing between several plot strands, they have more in common with modern-day TV series, unifying through theme rather than time, place and action. They are particularly remarkable, though, in giving almost all roles and lines to women and exploring the far reaches of what they might desire. Their stories include warrior women who lead an army out to war in Bell in Campo, a group of ‘academical ladies’ who have rejected patriarchal society to live in a utopian all-female enclave in The Female Academy, and in her 1668 play The Convent of Pleasure, Margaret imagines another free and independent female space, established by the wealthy heiress Lady Happy, where the women declaim on why ‘marriage is a curse’ and enact a series of skits dramatising the hardships of childbirth and living with violent, drunken, profligate or philandering husbands to illustrate their point. Into this atmosphere has come a foreign Princess, of androgynous allure, ‘a princely brave woman truly, of a masculine presence’, with whom Lady Happy falls in love. ‘Why may not I love a woman with the same affection I could a man?’ she reasons – and this time Margaret allows her same-sex couple a fervent kiss before the dream is shattered.

It might seem odd that such gynocentric fantasies and anti-marriage sentiments should come from a woman so happily married, but Margaret’s own good luck didn’t prevent her from recognising the injustice inflicted on women by the institution, or from feeling the force of the oppression, loathing and derision that men routinely directed at them.[65] As in her fictions, Margaret’s renegade feminist plays are mostly brought back down to earth with a bump with awkwardly conventional ‘happy’ endings – the Princess in the Convent of Pleasure turns out to be a Prince; the Female Academy proves vulnerable to the outside world and the Amazons must return to their ‘proper’ domestic sphere when the war is over. All the same, Margaret was provoking much-needed debate about gender expectations here, and revelling in writing female characters who would surely have filled the patriarchy with dread.

She followed these plays with a book of topical orations, fulfilling her ambition of becoming a female Cicero (though she never took to the podium; for a shy, tongue-tied woman with much to say, the page was far more welcoming), but her next few projects would be retrospective in nature. Looking back on her earlier philosophical works with fresh eyes and a great deal more study under her belt, she found them seriously wanting, littered with rushed sentences, garbled ideas and misused or unexplained terminology. So in 1664 she produced revised editions of Philosophical and Physical Opinions and Poems and Fancies, swiftly followed by Sociable Letters, a collection of 221 epistles musing on ‘the humours of mankind’, which included vivid descriptions of everyday Antwerp life, social satire, analysis of her own ambitions, fears and shortcomings and the first extended critical appraisal of Shakespeare.[66]

Sticking with the epistolary form (the lack of rigid generic rules suited Margaret’s wandering style), Philosophical Letters also appeared that year, which attacked the theories of the most revered male philosophers of the day – René Descartes, Jean Baptiste van Helmont, Thomas Hobbes, Walter Charleton, Galileo and Henry More – and invited challenges to her own opinions in return. This was a phenomenally brave and revealing move. Margaret was now so confident in her own philosophical opinions that she was engaging in public intellectual debate like any male scholar might.

Amid this flurry of publishing came another twist in the Cavendishes’ fortunes. Money was still tight thanks to the expensive restoration of Welbeck, so William attempted to call in an old debt from the King, which amounted to nearly £10,000. It didn’t quite work; the King refused to pay up, but in the summer of 1664, he offered William compensation in the form of a dukedom – a fair trade to William’s mind. The decree was passed and on 16 March 1665 William and Margaret became two of the noblest (though certainly not the richest) people in the land: the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle.

THE BLAZING WORLD

Now in her early forties, Margaret was a name to be reckoned with. The Duchess of Newcastle’s next book, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, published in 1666, again skewered the works of well-known figures such as Robert Boyle and Henry Power, but particularly Robert Hooke’s Micrographia – a book that recorded in intricate illustrations his findings under the microscope. As a founder member of the Royal Society, Hooke was delivering a powerful defence of its empirical modus operandi, but Margaret took issue with this approach. She and William owned a fine collection of microscopes and telescopes and, knowing how temperamental these early instruments were, she argued that they produced ‘fallacies, rather than discoveries of truth’, distorting more than they revealed and explaining only the exterior workings. Her rejection of experimentalism in favour of pure old-fashioned reasoning hasn’t aged so well, but she was in good company at the time: philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and physician Thomas Sydenham all shared her scepticism and later produced their own attacks on the Society and its methods.

What has stood the test of time is the appendix Margaret wrote as a ‘work of fancy’ to amuse herself and her readers after all this heavy theorising. Conceived in the midst of the Scientific Revolution and in the wake of the Age of Exploration, The Description of a New World, called the Blazing World was the most imaginative, exotic, genre-busting work of Margaret’s career. A romance novella, fantasy adventure, philosophical utopia and theological debate all in one, this indefinable tale takes us to an alternate universe and makes a strong case for being one of the first examples of science fiction in English literature and – 150 years before Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – the first ever to be written by a woman.

Interplanetary flights of fancy had been imagined before in other languages, but Margaret was quick to assert her originality; hers was a world ‘not such as Lucian’s, or the French-man’s world in the moon; but a world of my own creating’. And this was key to her romantic ambitions. As an ‘Authoress’, she could attain all the power in her imaginary world that, as a woman, she was denied in her own, for ‘though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did … I have made a world of my own.’[67] If her readers liked this other world, they could elect to be her subjects, and if not, this was no tyranny: ‘they may create worlds of their own, and govern themselves as they please’.[68]

In the first part of The Blazing World, which Margaret calls ‘romancical’, she upcycles many of the plot devices and philosophical ideas that appear in her earlier writings. A young woman is carried off against her will by a predatory man but is rescued by a shipwreck that carries her into another world, joined to her own at the North Pole. It’s called ‘the Blazing World’ because its stars are so bright they light up the night as if it were day. In this fantastical paradise, the land is ‘rich, and fruitful’, the cities are made of marble, amber, coral and gold, and there is no use for guns because the inhabitants ‘had no other enemies but the winds’. Here, human and animal merge. There are men ‘like foxes, only walking in an upright shape’ or with ‘heads, beaks, and feathers, like wild-geese’; ‘some were bear-men, some worm-men … some bird-men, some fly-men, some ant-men’, their skin a rainbow of colours – ‘some of a deep purple, some of a grass-green, some of a scarlet’, and so it goes on.

Quick as a flash, the young woman is married to the Emperor and, as Empress, is granted absolute power to govern this land as she pleases. Her first priority is to embark on a course of philosophical study – much like Margaret’s own – to enable her to govern as wisely as possible. So begins the ‘philosophical’ part of the narrative, in which the Empress calls together the great thinkers of this world, its priests and statesmen as well as ‘immaterial spirits’, to question them on their system of government (a monarchy, of course) and consult them on scientific and philosophical matters, from astronomy and weather phenomena to natural history, mathematics, logic, atoms, theology and ‘the beginning of forms’. Then she begins to make changes: she dissolves the societies she doesn’t approve of and forms new ones, and even establishes her own female-centric religion, though she ensures that this world, unlike the real one, is conspicuously free from religious persecution, with the Empress keeping her subjects ‘in a constant belief, without enforcement or blood-shed’.