Roaring Girls

In the final ‘fantastical’ section, Margaret pulls off a supreme act of vanity by making a surprise cameo as the scribe whose soul is sum-moned to help the Empress set down her founding constitution. In yet another same-sex tease, the two women form a deep, lover-like bond, travelling together to Margaret’s world to observe William; their two souls inhabit his body for a time, before Margaret is appointed the Empress’s chief advisor when invasion threatens her native country.

It’s an audacious, inventive, wonderfully weird piece of fiction – the culmination of all Margaret’s long-held ambitions to cast herself as a romance heroine, where the real and unreal, fantasy and autobiography meet.[69] Here, Margaret the First, ruler of her own imaginary empire, uses her power to create a proto-feminist utopia, free from war and religious division, where there is ‘no difference of sexes’ and women can fully participate in civic life. Only in the wildest alternate reality did such things seem possible, so Margaret created in make-believe what she couldn’t find in life: power, peace and gender equality.

As if to provide an antidote to her own oddity, Margaret’s next book was far less radical and, probably for that very reason, her most respected work during her lifetime. The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, published in 1667, was a straightforward biography of her husband, whose reputation needed a little rehabilitation; his flight from the Battle of Marston Moor hadn’t been forgotten and many of his rivals now thought him too old and unfit for political involvement. Unlike many of Margaret’s previous works, it was taken seriously by most. The historian John Rushworth used it as a source for his work on the Civil War, and two women were inspired to write similar biographies defending their husband’s war records: Lucy Hutchinson from the Parliamentarian side and Anne Fanshawe on the Royalist. Clearly, celebrating the achievements of her husband was considered a far more admirable use of Margaret’s time than scribbling on natural philosophy, outlandish other worlds or indeed her own life. And it was a celebration: as well as detailing William’s daily habits and activities, his upbringing and character, the book was a highly partial account of his political and military career, glorifying his successes, glancing over the stickier moments and hitting back at his detractors. This was William as Royalist martyr, a man who had stoically endured exile and financial castration for his loyalty to the King. The result was still remarkable in its way – it was the first biography of a husband by his wife, and was produced by a female publisher[70] – but inevitably it was a romanticised portrait seen through an adoring lover’s eyes.

As such, it still drew criticism. Samuel Pepys, always quick to belittle Margaret since she had disappointed him at the Royal Society earlier that year, began reading it the following spring but soon declared it a ‘ridiculous history’ that showed her to be ‘a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman, and [William] an ass to suffer [her] to write what she writes to him and of him’.[71] William’s crime in encouraging, rather than forbidding, his wife’s writing is ranked almost equal with Margaret’s insanity in writing it in the first place. The work was so overtly panegyric, likening the Duke’s deeds to those of Caesar, and at the same time so banal (who cared what he ate for dinner, how long he took to dress or how much money he had lost?) that, for Pepys, it was rendered an undignified and vulgar exercise that made both of them look absurd and Margaret – as usual – mad.

ALL THE TOWN-TALK

During the Cavendishes’ visit to London in the spring of 1667 – when Pepys chased Margaret all around town; when scores of children trailed in her wake; when she requested, and was granted, that historic visit to the Royal Society – one thing became quite clear: mad or not, the Duchess of Newcastle was now a celebrity. Restoration London was full of wonders, both thrilling and terrible. The backlash against Puritanism had ushered in a new era of licence, entertainment, flamboyance and festivity. The theatres had re-opened and women were walking their stages for the first time. Houses, shops, public buildings, churches and gaols had been reduced to charred skeletons, consumed by the most biblical conflagration the country had ever witnessed. And the Merry Monarch, Charles II, had presided over all, attended by his harem of mistresses. Yet still, this maimed, dazed and dazzled city was left open-mouthed with astonishment at the sight of Margaret Cavendish: the eccentrically dressed duchess who wrote fantastical books on mannish subjects and made ‘legs and bows’ instead of curtseys as if she were the heroine of one of her own romances.[72] The woman was a spectacle, and with that came the fame she had so long desired. But fame, she was learning, has its drawbacks.

The invitation to the Royal Society had caused controversy not just because Margaret was a woman, but because Margaret was Margaret. The fledgling Society’s endeavours had arrogant, atheistic, revolutionary overtones, and consequently it had enemies. Margaret had even been one of them. She agreed with many of the Society’s ideas and values, but she had criticised two of its leading members, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, in print not long before, as well as its whole programme of experimental research. Protective of the Society’s reputation, many of its members had been against the admittance of a woman who attracted ridicule and criticism, and when she finally arrived, looking like ‘a cavalier, but that she had no beard’, and the ingenious remarks that this sea of men were waiting for failed to materialise, they congratulated themselves on being proved right.[73]

Pepys’s fascination with Margaret curdled instantly, but John Evelyn, who had already started paying court to the Duke and Duchess at their house in Clerkenwell, was intrigued. After his first visit, he decided her oddities were a novel kind of amusement, proclaiming himself ‘much pleased with the extraordinary fanciful habit, garb and discourse of the Duchess’.[74] His wife, on the other hand, gave a damning verdict. Mary Evelyn conceded to a friend that Margaret had ‘a good shape, which she may truly boast of’, but had little else positive to say. Her dress was ‘fantastical’, her ‘curls and patches’ overdone, her mannerisms affected, excessive and insufferable – just like her work: ‘her gracious bows, seasonable nods, courteous stretching out of her hands, twinkling of her eyes, and various gestures of approbation, show what may be expected from her discourse, which is airy, empty, whimsical, and rambling as her books, aiming at science, difficulties, high notions, terminating commonly in nonsense, oaths, and obscenity’. Her ambition was nothing more than vanity, and what galled Mary most was that even wise, discerning men were taken in: ‘I found Doctor Charleton with her, complimenting her wit and learning in a high manner; which she took to be so much her due, that she swore if the schools did not banish Aristotle, and read Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, they did her wrong … Never did I see a woman so full of herself, so amazingly vain and ambitious.’[75]

What Mary Evelyn had missed was that much of this behaviour was Margaret’s attempt at masking her own social awkwardness. Even in middle age, as a well-known author, she was gripped by shyness at society gatherings, causing her to overcompensate with overt displays of conviviality. Nerves would make her talkative, and in the wake of those accusations that her works were not her own, she chattered about her books ‘more … than otherwise I should have done’[76] and learned passages by heart to prove her authorship.

The effect was quite the opposite of the one she was aiming for. A confident, ambitious woman translated as vulgar and arrogant, antagonising more conventional women like Mary Evelyn, who, like Dorothy Osborne, thought it improper and unchaste for a woman to write books at all, let alone books like Margaret’s. Though not uncultured herself, Mary toed the patriarchal line when it came to the ‘proper’ purpose of a woman’s life: they were ‘not born to read authors and censure the learned’, but to be of service to the sick, the poor, their husbands and children.[77] She couldn’t help drawing comparisons between Margaret and the ‘matchless’ Katherine Philips, whose respectable poems on Platonic love and friendship had been published without her consent, and who therefore fitted the modest mould of femininity to perfection: ‘What contrary miracles does this age produce,’ Mary exclaimed in her letters. ‘This lady and Mrs Philips! The one transported with the shadow of reason, the other possessed of the substance and insensible of her treasure.’

So alarmed was Mary by this new breed of woman that she would quickly remove herself from Margaret’s presence for ‘fear of infection’, and hoped that ‘as she is an original, she may never have a copy’.[78] Perhaps she had heard about Margaret’s recent trip to the theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where William’s play The Humorous Lovers (thought by Pepys to be ‘the silly play of my Lady Newcastle’s’) was being performed,[79] for on that occasion she wore a special dress of her own design that exposed her breasts, ‘all laid out to view’, revealing ‘scarlet trimmed nipples’. Such an heroic, classical, barely-there costume might have been acceptable for a court masque or a portrait, but for a trip to the theatre this was a whimsy too far.[80] It was these kinds of theatrical displays that prompted Pepys to note in his diary that ‘All the town-talk is nowadays of her extravagancies’[81] and left Mary Evelyn almost dumbstruck. Like Pepys and Dorothy Osborne, she could only conclude that Margaret Cavendish belonged in the madhouse: ‘I was surprised to find so much extravagancy and vanity in any person not confined within four walls.’

It’s not altogether surprising that some of Margaret’s fiercest critics were women. This other-worldly being, who was ‘not of mortal race, and, therefore, cannot be defined’, who could only be compared with queens and romance heroines, was flouting all the rules that other women felt obliged to live by. When Margaret was around, women like Mary Evelyn were pushed to the sidelines, expected ‘not to speak, but admire’[82] – and having always been taught to view other women as rivals rather than sisters, inevitably they sometimes resorted to jealousy, judgement, spite and even fear.

However, regardless of whether they approved of her or not, the public had made a mythical creature out of the Duchess; they talked about her, wrote about her and were desperate to catch sight of her. Margaret had courted the attention, and enjoyed being a visual spectacle, but as a social misfit striving hard to impress a sceptical crowd, she was bound to disappoint occasionally. As she struggled through the hobnobbing and learned what a fickle friend celebrity could be, perhaps the lustre wore off a little, for come July 1667, the Cavendishes returned to the peace and solitude of Welbeck, where Margaret was always happiest.

MARGARET THE FIRST

Margaret got straight back to work on her return to Welbeck, and over the next few years she concentrated on revising more works to prove just how much she had matured as a philosopher and writer. Her new editions reflected her broadened reading and contained tightened, simplified and in some cases reversed versions of her earlier arguments, with clearer explanations, defined terminology and the fancies expunged. Significantly, she also removed her most apologetic prefaces, no longer feeling the need to make excuses for her lack of education or to convince the world that what she had to say was worth hearing. After years of self-doubt, public censure and lonely trailblazing, Margaret had finally found genuine confidence as a woman writer, secure in the knowledge that her words and opinions were as valuable as anyone else’s.

It was in the nick of time, as it turned out, because for all that anyone might have expected William – some 30 years older – to go first, it was Margaret who died suddenly on 15 December 1673. She’d been indefatigable to the last, but weakened by compulsive work, a sedentary lifestyle and years of self-inflicted bleeds and purges, she ‘soon too active for her body grew’.[83] She was 50 years old.

As befitted a duchess and a celebrity, Margaret was given a grand burial at Westminster Abbey, and although William, elderly and grief-stricken, was too ill to attend, he arranged all the pageantry for his beloved, and collected for publication all the poems and letters from scholars, friends, philosophers and poets that had been written in celebration of her, in life and after her death. He joined her three years later, aged 84, and the two have lain side by side in stone effigy ever since, where Margaret, resplendent in state robes, holds an open book, pen case and inkhorn perpetually at the ready.

From her own day to this, Margaret Cavendish has been a divisive character. With each century extracting the caricature version of her that has best suited its own cultural values, from indulged aristocrat and raving madwoman to pioneering genius and visionary proto-feminist, responses to her have rarely been measured. For all those among her contemporaries who saw an ‘illustrious whore’ and ‘atheistical philosophraster’,[84] or agreed with Pepys, Osborne and Evelyn that she was mad, there were plenty who praised her achievements: Cambridge University addressed her as Margareta I, Philosophorum Princeps – ‘Margaret the First, Prince of Philosophers’; the writers John Dryden, Richard Flecknoe and Thomas Shadwell dedicated works to both her and William, grateful for their patronage, while Dr Walter Charleton believed she had ‘convinced the world, by her own heroic example, that no studies are too hard for her softer sex’. Women writers, meanwhile, were inspired by her example. The astrologer Sarah Jinner published her first almanac in 1658, praising Margaret as an exemplar of the learned woman. And scholar, tutor and writer Bathsua Makin included Margaret in her catalogue of great women, alongside Elizabeth I, Christina of Sweden and Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, in her 1673 Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen. By the end of Margaret’s life, the ‘Queen of Sciences’[85] had earned her place in English literature and, to a precious few, demonstrated that intelligence was genderless.

Eighteenth-century commentators were as torn as their predecessors, however. The general feeling was kindly, but perhaps only because Margaret’s more challenging writings on natural philosophy and women’s advancement had by then faded into the background; she was now known as a writer of dramatic fanciful tales and poetry, and as a ‘perfect pattern of conjugal love and duty’, whose crowning glory was her biography of her husband.[86] The writer, art historian and Whig politician Horace Walpole, however, was not generous. In 1758, he sneered at her ‘unbounded passion for scribbling’ and remarked that ‘though she had written philosophy, it seems she had read none’. Walpole was at least egalitarian in his slights; he found both Margaret and William equally ridiculous, ‘a picture of foolish nobility’, tucked away together in state, ‘intoxicating one another with circumstantial flattery on what was of consequence to no mortal but themselves!’[87]

Walpole’s critique was harsh, but this was the image of the Cavendishes that carried over into subsequent centuries. Most nineteenth-century editors kept in line with public taste by selecting only Margaret’s more frivolous works for publication (they particularly liked her poems on fairies), omitting anything they viewed as coarse or controversial. Yet despite this bowdlerisation, it was around this time that Margaret was first dubbed ‘Mad Madge’, a title that reduced her to some kind of lovable twit and entirely dismissed her intelligence, diversity and originality.[88]

Saddled with this dubious new moniker, her reputation was at its lowest at the onset of the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf shared Walpole’s vision of Margaret as a ‘lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers’, scribbling away ‘without audience or criticism’, and her opinion was influential. Infuriated by her upper-class impunity to criticism and her informal, undisciplined, unscholarly approach to writing, she saw in Margaret a woman with all ‘the irresponsibility of a child and the arrogance of a duchess’,[89] whose imagination was allowed to run rampant, ‘as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death’.[90] In the end, half admiring, half despairing, she summed up Margaret as ‘noble and quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted’ – only perpetuating the ‘crazy duchess’ theory.[91]

But this is the twenty-first century; as the Cheshire Cat would say, we’re all mad here. The very traits that appalled our ancestors are what appeal to us today – Margaret’s raw energy; her bold, riotous mind and unbridled curiosity; her daring, originality, versatility, ambition and eccentricity; take any of them away and it would dull her brilliance. At last she can be wholeheartedly applauded for confounding every traditional notion of what a woman should, or could, be: scientist, thinker, philosopher and one of the most flamboyant and prolific writers (male or female) of her era.

True, she was no ready-made feminist icon, but if anything, her faltering journey towards enlightenment only adds to her fascination. Throughout her imperfect career, we see almost in real time the development of a woman shaking off the barnacles of patriarchal thinking, building her confidence and learning to trust her own talent until she genuinely believes in what women can do. It’s the culmination of this process, her extraordinary, genre-defying Blazing World – not her biography of her husband – that is now regarded as her greatest work; beloved by feminist scholars, it’s one of the few still available in print.

Inevitably, Margaret’s privileged social position allowed her the relative freedom to kick down barriers that other women couldn’t, enabling her to achieve a number of historic firsts. But she was acutely aware of the perils of what she was doing. A woman of wit in seventeenth-century England ‘loses her reputation’, she wrote, for wit is sometimes ‘satirical and sometimes amorous and sometimes wanton’; it strays into ‘unfeminine’ subjects and employs coarse language, all of which ‘women should shun’. Judged by such standards, she may not have fitted anyone’s definition of either a woman or a wit except her own, but it paid off in the long run – and it was the long run that mattered to Margaret. Fame and immortality were her heart’s immodest desire, and while she found them during her lifetime, it’s perhaps only now that she is gaining the reputation she both wanted and deserves. ‘I would be known to the world by my wit, not by my folly,’ she wrote. And, ‘Who knows but after my honourable burial, I may have a glorious resurrection in following ages, since time brings strange and unusual things to pass.’[92] She was right. It would take nearly four centuries, but the day would come when the world was ready for Margaret the First, Duchess of Newcastle.

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