In later life, Margaret Cavendish’s designs on fame make her sound like Boris Johnson: here was a woman who wanted to be an “empress and authoress of the whole world”. But who knows from where this rank ambition sprang? As even her latest biographer, Francesca Peacock, admits, it’s so hard to put the two halves of this uncommon creature together: the ill-educated girl who was practically mute with shyness, and the prolific and notorious writer who, in 1667, would become the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society (an occurrence, incidentally, that would not be repeated for a couple of centuries). No wonder that in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf took the easy route out, dismissing Cavendish as “crack-brained and bird-witted”, a “crazy Duchess”, a “bogey to frighten clever girls with”.
Her best-known work is The Blazing World, a utopian prose piece that may be read as proto-science fiction (it’s available as a Penguin Classic). But this isn’t saying much. For all the claims that Peacock makes in Pure Wit for her subject’s writing and philosophical thinking, in the 21st century, her appeal for the non-scholar surely lies more in the life rather than in the work. What drama! It would make a good movie. Cavendish had the misfortune (or was it?) to be born in 1623, to a family that, once the civil war was under way, soon fell foul of the Puritans; during the siege of Colchester in 1648, her childhood home, St John’s Abbey, was stormed by the Parliamentary army. (The soldiers made their way to the vault below its chapel, where they cut the hair off of her mother and sister, and wore it mockingly, as makeshift wigs.) Luckily, by this point, Cavendish had already fled to Oxford, where Charles I had established his court, and where she would soon become a maid of honour to Queen Henrietta Maria.
In 1644, the queen fled to France, taking her ladies with her. But while she was given lodgings at the Louvre, and a country house in Saint-Germain, court life in Paris was not precisely grand. As Peacock tells us, the exiles could not cross their apartments without coming upon piles of excrement – courtiers and staff alike were in the habit of crouching in corners – and Margaret was soon ill with dysentery. Still, never mind. Distraction came with the arrival of William Cavendish, the Marquis of Newcastle, who would become her husband only nine months later. William, 30 years her senior, had a poor war record – he’d led a group of volunteers during the rout by the Parliamentarians at Marston Moor – and the fighting had left him broke. He was also reputed to be a womaniser. Margaret, though, took to him, and her feelings were reciprocated. In the run-up to their marriage, William wrote her 70 adoring poems.
The couple were not able to have children together, and William’s from his first marriage did not take to their stepmother. But for the times, they were a relatively happy, relatively equal couple, and after they moved to Antwerp, where they lived in Rubens’s house, he set about educating her (William was something of a literary patron; Ben Jonson had stayed at Welbeck, his Nottinghamshire estate). Peacock speculates that Cavendish may have begun writing initially for money, but whatever her motivation, she was soon a published author. So certain was she of her abilities, she commissioned an artist to create two ornate frontispieces for her books. In them, she appears part aristocrat, and part Greek statue, the suggestion being that she is an heir to the likes of Ovid and Homer.
After the Restoration of Charles II, the couple returned to England, and to William’s estates, and Cavendish somehow became a well-known public figure, famed as much for her eccentric appearance as for her work. In London, everyone wanted to meet her, though they were sometimes disappointed when they did; many were with Mary, the wife of the diarist John Evelyn, who thought her insane. By 1667, and by now a duchess, she was the talk of society: a semi-mythical creature who appeared in Samuel Pepys’s diary, flashed her “scarlet-trimmed nipples” at the theatre, and had a face covered in black patches, accessories that were highly fashionable but which also covered her pimples. When she died in 1673, she was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey.
This book, its author’s first, is in many ways excellent: well-written, well-researched, interesting and peppy. She brings Cavendish and her circle to life. But I do wonder how necessary Pure Wit is. Katie Whitaker published a prize-winning biography of Cavendish in 2003; this one does not offer much that’s new. Peacock writes in her introduction that “history withers if we only consider the parts of it that feel relevant to our own predicaments”, which seems about right to me; I wish more biographers would remember it. However, possibly at the urging of an anxious publisher, she also goes on to say an awful lot about 17th-century cross-dressing, and to liken Cavendish’s (in her eyes) radical feminist ideas to the thinking of Shulamith Firestone and bell hooks, at which point things get a bit strained. Quite often, she protests too much, insisting on the unnoticed brilliance even of Cavendish’s worst and least accessible writing. I loved the bits about the court, the carriages and the clothes, but Peacock’s long accounts of such concepts as vitalist materialism – a pet theory of Cavendish’s – gave me the old, restless feeling of being in a library at exam time.
Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock is published by Head of Zeus (£27.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
