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Her Blazing World

Margaret Cavendish’s boldness and bravery set 17th-century society alight, but is she a feminist poster-girl for our times?

With its imagined world, and irreconcilable contradictions, The Female Academy is a good window into thinking about its author, Margaret Cavendish (1623-73): the poet, philosopher, scientist, playwright, fashion pioneer, science fiction writer and early feminist (her job titles could go on and on). In the four centuries after her birth, approaches to her vacillate between idolising her appearance and performances (John Evelyn, the 17th-century diarist, must have angered his wife when he wrote repeatedly in his diary of how he could not stay away from Cavendish’s ‘extraordinary fanciful habit, garb, and discourse’), and being rather less adoring. Cavendish is normally remembered for three things: for being ‘mad’ (an accusation that has dogged her since an all-too-easily scandalised reader of her first book, one Dorothy Osborne, quipped that she had seen ‘soberer people in Bedlam’), for wearing outrageous clothes (she supposedly cavorted around London in a carriage pulled by eight white bulls, and wore dresses cut to below the level of her nipples), and, rather more nebulously, for being the ‘mother of science fiction’.

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