PURE WIT

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.