For those looking for a straightforward feminist heroine in Margaret Cavendish, this is a problem. Keen to present herself as a wonder of the age, as something ‘other’ than the average woman, she voices the troubling suggestion that women are not naturally suited for intellectual pursuits more than once in Poems and Fancies: ‘True it is,’ she writes in one epistle, ‘spinning with the fingers is more proper to our sex, than studying or writing poetry.’[41] And in her address ‘To all writing ladies’, despite urging them to push beyond their domestic sphere into the world of politics, religion, philosophy and poetry, she adds that ‘though we be inferior to men, let us shew our selves a degree above beasts’.[42]
At this early stage in her career, when her ideas are in their infancy, Margaret is infuriatingly inconsistent on women’s intellectual worth. With her own busy, capacious, ambitious mind fighting the remnants of patriarchal indoctrination, she flip-flops from apologist to agitator and back again. Elsewhere in the same book, she delivers a defiant ‘up yours’ to the snide world outside that’s just itching to condemn her:
Tis true, the world may wonder at my confidence, how I dare put out a book, especially in these censorious times; but why should I be ashamed, or afraid, where no evil is, and not please my self in the satisfaction of innocent desires? For a smile of neglect cannot dishearten me, no more can a frown of dislike affright me … my mind’s too big, and I had rather venture an indiscretion, than lose the hopes of a fame. [43]
This is the Margaret Cavendish that feminists adore, emerging from her chrysalis: singular, ambitious, confident of her intelligence and proudly dismissive of what others think. Over time, her ideas on women, like her ideas on natural philosophy, would develop into a much more coherent, formidable statement, but for now, she was primarily on the defensive, knowing damn well that her actions, though harmless, would be seen as provocative. With Sir Edward Denny’s famous hectoring verse to Lady Mary Wroth still ringing in Margaret’s ears three decades after it was written, she imagined men telling her, too, to go back to her sewing:
Work Lady, work, let writing books alone,
For surely wiser women nere wrote one. [44]
But Margaret would do no such thing, ‘For all I desire, is Fame.’ And fame she would get. Throughout her writing career, she would produce a staggering 23 books – accounting for over half of the total number of books (just 42) published by women between 1600 and 1640.[45] With her unabashed ambitions, and with few to rival her intrepid subject matter or prolific output,[46] Margaret would stand almost entirely alone in the century as a woman writer who could not be ignored.
MANY SOBERER PEOPLE IN BEDLAM
After nearly 18 months in England, Margaret grew impatient to return to William in Antwerp. She had sent her first book to the printers and even dashed off another (Philosophical Fancies),[47] and Sir Charles’s estates had finally been released from sequestration, enabling him to buy back the family seats of Welbeck and Bolsover (though at a greatly inflated price) and stabilise the family’s finances. So on 16 February 1653, just two months before Poems and Fancies was due to publish, Margaret set off back to Antwerp, reluctantly leaving her brother-in-law behind as he had succumbed to a fever.
With the lovers rapturously reunited, and the publication of her first two books imminent, Margaret’s secret was out, and to her relief and gratitude she found in William a rare husband who entirely supported his wife’s new career. He understood her literary ambitions because he had them himself, though he had the grace to recognise that she was the better writer. He would encourage her, write prefaces and the odd line or verse for her, praise her (blindly, some said), and together they sent out her books to their illustrious friends and waited nervously for the responses.
Anticipation was high when Poems and Fancies was due to appear in April – though not necessarily for the right reasons. Dorothy Osborne wrote excitedly to her betrothed, Sir William Temple, ‘… first let me ask you if you have seen a book of poems newly come out, made by my Lady Newcastle?’ There was a concealed barb in her enquiry, however, as she clearly intended to despise it: ‘For God’s sake if you meet with it send it to me; they say tis ten times more extravagant than her dress. Sure, the poor woman is a little distracted, she could never be so ridiculous else as to venture at writing books, and in verse too.’[48] Margaret’s reputation as an eccentric had preceded her, and for many her decision to write only confirmed their prejudices.
Once they had actually opened the book, reader responses were mixed. The 2nd Earl of Westmorland, Mildmay Fane, was an avid fan, scrawling a poem in praise of Margaret’s talent inside his copy, while friends of the Cavendishes predictably gave it a glowing review. The highly cultured polymath and Dutch diplomat Constantijn Huygens wrote to a friend that it was ‘a wonderful book, whose extravagant atoms kept me from sleeping a great part of last night’. Others were less impressed. Once she’d got her hands on it, Dorothy Osborne felt entirely vindicated in her assumptions that Margaret must surely be mad, sniping to Sir William: ‘You need not send me my Lady Newcastle’s book at all, for I have seen it, and am satisfied that there are many soberer people in Bedlam. I’ll swear her friends are much to blame to let her go abroad.’[49] Margaret was not only compromising her womanly virtue by publishing a book; she was also guilty of an ‘extravagant’ kind of literature. Her ‘free and noble style’ that ‘runs wild about, it cares not where’[50] was scatterbrained, unrefined and hard to follow – it was all far too unconventional for Dorothy Osborne.
Another worrying response came from friend and courtier Sir Edward Hyde, who offered the ultimate back-handed compliment that a woman could surely not have written so clever, so learned, so masculine a book, with ‘so many terms of art, and such expressions proper to all sciences’.[51] The humble apologia, used so commonly by male writers and taken as intended – a rhetorical show of modesty aimed at endearing the writer to his audience – were in Margaret’s case being taken as an admission that she was so inept she must be passing off someone else’s work as her own. It was yet another accusation to add to the list of defences she was compiling for her next work, which was already underway.
On arriving back in Antwerp, Margaret had eagerly returned to a collection of essays she had started before her trip to England, but when she sifted through her papers, she was disheartened by what she found. It was obvious, even to her, that they were littered with errors and sagging under the weight of stunted arguments, half-baked ideas and distracting digressions. To revise them seemed too Herculean a task, so, true to form, in late 1654, she lazily published them anyway, as The World’s Olio – a concoction of observations on all manner of subjects, literary, political, social and philosophical, that made up the rich stew or ‘olio’ of the title – and, without correcting the proofs, sent it out into the world to be assessed, warts and all.
Hampered, still, by the misconception that she was not up to the task at hand, Margaret again used prefaces to excuse her faults and lay the blame on her gender: ‘It cannot be expected I should write so wisely or wittily as men,’ she insisted, ‘being of the effeminate sex, whose brains nature hath mix’d with the coldest and softest elements’.[52] She rejected the ‘great complaints’ from women, which were evidently becoming louder, that men had ‘usurped a supremacy’ over them since Creation. In fact, she argued the opposite, that ‘Men have great reason not to let us in to their governments, for there is great difference betwixt the masculine brain and the feminine’. While men had the strength of an oak, women, she wrote, were like willows, ‘a yielding vegetable, not fit nor proper to build houses and ships’.[53] They might exceed men in beauty, affections, piety and charity, but women didn’t have the judgement, understanding and rhetorical skills of men.
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