Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

English playwright, philosopher, scientist, and woman of letters

• Born: 1623
• Birthplace: St. Johns Abbey, near Colchester, Essex, England
• Died: December 15, 1673
• Place of death: Welbeck Abbey, near Nottingham, England

Newcastle was the first Englishwoman to seek print publication and to publish prolifically. Her written work, thirteen books in twenty-two editions, encompassed poetry, fiction, philosophy, drama, science, biography, and autobiography.

Early Life

Margaret Cavendish, later the duchess of Newcastle, was the daughter of Thomas Lucas (c. 1573-1625), a wealthy landowner. Thomas was the son of Sir Thomas Lucas (c. 1531-1611), with whom he is sometimes confused. Although it is often mistakenly said that he was earl of Colchester, Newcastle’s father had no title, and he died when the future duchess was still an infant. Her mother was Elizabeth Leighton (d. 1647), daughter of John Leighton, a gentleman of London. After the death of her husband, Elizabeth managed the family estates, largely on her own, and provided Margaret with an example of how a woman might act to protect family interests.

Margaret Lucas had several siblings, including Sir Charles Cavendish (d. 1648), a Royalist hero and martyr (summarily executed after the Battle of Colchester); Catherine Lucas Pye (Margaret’s favorite sister); Ann Lucas (to whom she wrote a letter of warning about the dangers of marriage for women); Sir John Lucas (later Lord Lucas of Shenfield); and Sir Thomas Lucas (a soldier). Sir John Denham remarked in a poem that Newcastle’s brother John was a serious scholar, and it was in this brother’s library that she seems to have spent a good deal of time as a child. She was, she said, educated by a gentlewoman, who was employed for that purpose.

In 1645, while a maid of honor to Queen Henrietta Maria and while living with the exiled English court in Paris, Margaret met her future husband, William Cavendish (1593-1676), marquess and later duke of Newcastle. The two were married in late November or early December of 1645, at which time Margaret became the marchioness of Newcastle. She would become duchess upon her husband’s creation as duke in 1665. The wedding ceremony took place in the private chapel of the English resident at the French court, Sir Richard Browne. The bride and groom eventually settled in Antwerp, in a house once owned by the painter Peter Paul Rubens. They had no offspring, though William was father to children from his first marriage.

The marquess was himself a playwright, as were two of his daughters, Lady Elizabeth Brackley and Jane Cavendish. He is important in his own right, both as a playwright and as a military commander in the English Civil War. Elizabeth and Jane are known today for their play The Concealed Fancies (c. 1645). Margaret and her husband were the center of a scientific and belletristic circle that included Thomas Hobbes , whose materialist philosophy was important to the development of the marchioness of Newcastle’s thinking.

Life’s Work

In November of 1651, the marchioness of Newcastle traveled to England with the marquess’s brother, the scientist Sir Charles Cavendish, hoping to gain something from her husband’s sequestered estates by appealing to the Parliamentary Committee for Compounding. During this period, she found a publisher for her Poems and Fancies (1653) and gained a reputation for odd or eccentric dress. This first book of poems, printed with Newcastle’s name on the title page rather than anonymously, was enormously popular, if subject to ridicule, and she may have realized a profit from its publication. Poems and Fancies, which appeared in revised editions in 1664 and 1672, incorporates atomic theory resembling that of the natural philosopher Walter Charleton, as well as containing poems on fairy folk. “Hunting the Hare,” found in the volume, has been noted as an early poem dealing with cruelty to animals.

The book of poems was followed by several diverse publications. The World’s Olio (1655) was a collection of brief observations on a wide variety of topics. It included witty remarks on historical and mythological figures and advice on medical matters. Philosophicall Fancies (1653; revised as Philosophical and Physical Opinions , 1655) demonstrated Newcastle’s new emphasis on materialist and vitalist natural philosophy. Nature’s Pictures (1656), on the other hand, was a collection of love stories in verse and prose. It considered issues of sex and gender, and the first edition contained the much-studied brief autobiographical essay, “A True Relation.” Newcastle’s husband also contributed poetry to the volume. Indeed, his prefaces to her printed work make clear that he approved of her writing and occasionally collaborated with her, a situation that later drew derision from twentieth century author Virginia Woolf.

With the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, the Newcastles returned to England, first to the London court but soon thereafter to Nottinghamshire. The marchioness next published Plays (1662), most of which were probably written while she was in Antwerp. The plays deal with issues of sex and gender and sometimes include women warriors. Orations of Divers Sorts (1662, 1668) collects exemplary speeches meant to be delivered at set occasions. In one set of speeches, a group of women debate the place of women in society. CCXI Sociable Letters (1664) contains highly readable, mostly fictional letters addressed by one woman to another. It includes interesting anecdotes and commentary on courtship, marriage, infidelity, and divorce.

Newcastle’s Philosophical Letters (1664) critiques René Descartes , Johannes Baptista van Helmont, Thomas Hobbes, and Henry More. It was her first, but not her last, direct engagement with her fellow philosophers. Her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666) represents an attack on Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665). The former text contains The Description of a New Blazing World , a much-discussed work of science fiction, notable for its depiction of Cavendish as two separate but interacting characters, an empress and the duchess of Newcastle.

The duchess’s tribute to her husband, The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle (1667), translated as De vita et rebus gentis Guillielmi Duicis Novo-castrensis (1668), attracted the opprobrium of the diarist Samuel Pepys, who followed the duchess around Hyde Park in the spring of 1667. Pepys found her physically attractive but felt that her husband should not have encouraged her to write. Also in the spring of 1667, Cavendish visited the Royal Society with a huge entourage. This was the first visit by a woman to that male institution. The following year, she published Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), a reworking of the second edition of Philosophical and Physical Opinions in a more tentative and plainer style, as well as The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World (1668)—a separate edition of A New Blazing World—and Plays Never Before Printed (1668), which continues themes found in her first collection of plays.

Significance

It is difficult to gauge accurately the literary and scientific importance of the duchess of Newcastle, during her own lifetime. Certainly she was widely known, if often the subject of chuckles. Mary Evelyn, wife to diarist John Evelyn , seems to have disliked and envied her. Newcastle’s work, moreover, gained little notice of any kind in the first one hundred years after her death. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, a shift had taken place: Newcastle came to be seen as a harmless and delightful eccentric who produced charming verse on the subject of moods and fairy folk. George Ballard’s Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1752) popularized selected poems of Newcastle, and anthologists of women’s poetry generally followed his lead. Horace Walpole, in A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors (1758), treated her literary output with contempt, but Charles Lamb, in “Mackery End” (1823), became the champion of someone he took to be a wonderfully fanciful poet.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Newcastle the poet of fairy folk was supplanted by Newcastle the loyal wife, who suffered with her husband in exile and who recorded his war years in his biography. M. A. Lower and C. H. Firth produced new editions of The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, both of which were frequently reprinted. Firth’s commentary sought to confirm Newcastle’s understanding of the English Civil Wars. Finally, early twentieth century treatments of the novel often noted that studies of character found in CCXI Sociable Letters foreshadowed developments in eighteenth century realistic fiction.

Today, Newcastle is studied mainly by three groups of readers: (1) those who have an interest in sex, gender, and politics in seventeenth century England; (2) historians of science; and (3) historians of drama. Many feminists find her writing to be a puzzling mix of protofeminist and traditional positions, but they have become less likely to see her as a bad writer whose bad writing derives from oppression by men. Rather, Newcastle is seen as a good writer who overcame the impediments of patriarchy to produce books that are oblique, ironic, and full of fun. The Blazing World is often studied in the college classroom, and The Convent of Pleasure (1668) is still performed. Her defense of William Shakespeare, among the first extended treatments of that playwright by any writer, is also gaining recognition.

Bibliography

Cavendish, Margaret. Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader. Edited by Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1999. This paperback school edition has scholarly authority and gives a good selection of Cavendish’s writing.

Clucas, Stephen, ed. A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Ashgate Press, 2003. Clucas’s collection covers Cavendish’s drama, science writing, life, and positions on the place of women in society.

Cottegnies, Line, and Nancy Weitz, eds. Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 2003. This collection asserts that Cavendish, rather than being ignorant of the conventions of genre, cleverly adapted them for her own purposes.

Whitaker, Katie. Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by Her Pen. New York: Basic Books, 2002. A thorough, reliable, and well-documented biography.