Madness or Brilliance? The Life and Work of Margaret Cavendish

    

 

      The prolific Seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish has often been referred to as “Mad Madge.” This blog entry seeks to determine the degree of her eccentricity. Was she really off track in her writing or was she called mad because she was a woman who wrote about topics that were viewed as male only areas of expertise during her lifetime?

            Margaret Cavendish was born in Essex in 1623 to a wealthy family and received a privately tutored education. Because of her family’s wealth she was able to become a maid of honor to Queen Henrietta Maria and followed the queen to Paris after she was exiled. There she met her husband, the Duke of Newcastle, and they married in 1645 and returned to England. Cavendish never had children, and in 1653 she published her first book called Poems, and Fancies. She wrote on topics such as natural science and philosophy, and in 1666 she published Blazing World, which is now described as one of the oldest known science fiction works in the world.

            Perhaps the greatest support for her writing career came from her husband. He wrote this in the introduction to her book Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy:

“This book is book of books, and only fits

Great searching brains, and quintessence of wits;

For this will give you an eternal fame,

And last to all posterity your name:

You conquer death, in a perpetual life;

And make me famous too in such a wife.

So I will prophesy in spite of fools,

When dead, then honoured, and be read in schools.

And ipse dixit lost, not he, but she

Still cited in your strong philosophy.”

-William Newcastle

            Cavendish received many critiques by both her contemporaries as well as later scholars. Many of her colleagues did not take her seriously, although she made legitimate arguments. Also in her book she thoroughly discussed ideas from Aristotle, Plato, Epicurus, and Pythagoras. Something which also likely contributed to her colleagues dislike of her was the fact that she called them “botchers and brokers” who borrow and repeat ideas from past philosophers and do not give them the full credit they deserve. Cavendish was the embodiment of what many male intellectuals feared in the seventeenth-century if women were able to achieve the same education and academic status as the male elite. She was intelligent and unafraid to publish her own ideas in her own name, and also to debate and compare them to both past and present male intellectuals. She did not wait for women to be considered equal to men, she considered herself equal to her colleagues which makes her especially relevant to the study of women’s history.

     Below is an interesting excerpt from the same book quoted above in which Cavendish addresses gender issues and provides substance to the argument for her inclusion as an early feminist.

“I might set up a sect or school for myself, without any

prejudice to them: But I, being a woman, do fear they would soon cast me

out of their schools; for, though the muses, graces and sciences are all of

the female gender, yet they were more esteemed in former ages, than

they are now; nay, could it be done handsomely, they would now turn

them all from females into males: So great is grown the self-conceit of the

masculine, and the disregard of the female sex.”

 –(Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, 249)

Sources:

Biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne (c. 1623-1673).             http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/collectionsindepth/family/newcanewc/biographies/biographyofmargaretcavendish,duchessofnewcastleupontyne(c1623-1673).aspx.

“Margaret Cavendish”            https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Margaret_Cavendish.html

Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, and Eileen O'Neill. Observations Upon Experimental      Philosophy. Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 2001. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost),                        EBSCOhost (accessed April 2, 2014).