Pure Wit

Starred review from November 6, 2023
Journalist Peacock debuts with an excellent biography of 17th-century English author and “proto-feminist” Margaret Cavendish (née Lucas). Born in 1623, Margaret grew up in a wealthy family whose Royalist sympathies during the English Civil War inspired her at age 20 to join Queen Henrietta Maria’s court as a lady-in-waiting. She fled with the queen to France in 1644, where she married William Cavendish, a disgraced Royalist general who retreated to France after a humiliating defeat on the battlefield, and later returned with him to England after Charles II’s restoration in 1660. Highlighting the trailblazing fiction, poetry, and philosophical and scientific treatises Cavendish wrote before her sudden death in 1673, Peacock credits her 1666 novel, The Blazing World, in which a young woman becomes empress of an alternate realm, as “one of the earliest works of science fiction.” Peacock captures Cavendish’s larger-than-life persona (an amusing scene recounts when Cavendish, accepting the Royal Society’s reluctant invitation for her to become the first woman to visit their headquarters, arrived in a “decadent dress... followed by her troupe of attendant ladies as crowds clamoured to see her”) and perceptively teases out her contradictions, noting that despite Cavendish’s “belief that marriage was an oppressive form of bondage,” she lacked “interest in the existence of people who were kept in true slavery.” It’s a nuanced look at the life of a complicated female trailblazer.

Starred review from November 1, 2023
An engaging portrait of a significant 17th-century cultural figure. Arts journalist Peacock makes an impressive book debut with a deeply researched biography of Margaret Lucas Cavendish (1623-1673), a poet, essayist, fiction writer, and playwright who "was not just the over-indulged wife of a duke: she was the epicenter of a new wave of women's writing, education, and thinking." Cavendish sported outlandish clothes and wrote passionately about issues such as matter, knowledge, and free will. Her most famous novel was a pioneering work of science fiction. Though ambitious for fame, she knew that "many of her contemporaries saw her simply as...a lady writer who wrote silly books." Peacock, though, contextualizes her life and work within contemporary scientific and philosophical debates and tumultuous cultural and political events. Margaret grew up in a wealthy, Royalist family that became victims of Puritan violence during the English Civil War. In 1643, she joined the court of Henrietta Maria, the defiant wife of Charles I, following her into exile in France. There, she met William Cavendish--later elevated to Duke of Newcastle--a man 30 years older. They married in 1645. Although Margaret later repeatedly expressed "antipathy to marriage," which she deemed "a considerably better deal for a man than a woman," Peacock sees this view as representing women's collective experience, rather than her own dissatisfaction. William supported her writing endeavors, and, as a "literary and scientific patron," afforded her entry into a cosmopolitan intellectual world. Peacock acknowledges the confusions and contradictions of much of Margaret's work, but she takes her seriously as a feminist thinker and natural philosopher, grappling with questions that occupied Descartes and Hobbes. Drawing on a wealth of sources, she counters the trivializing image of Cavendish as "some strange combination of a costumed actress, unreal goddess, and magical princess." A sensitive, nuanced biography of an idiosyncratic woman.

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