Lucy Hughes-Hallett

The extraordinary life of 17th-century polymath Margaret Cavendish

Some thought her completely mad but others were transfixed by her wayward personality and idiosyncratic writings, in which she switched from factual narrative to phantasmagorical fiction and polemical plays

Portrait of Margaret Cavendish by Peter Lely, 1665. [Alamy]  
issue 09 September 2023

Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century Duchess of Newcastle, has been described as a heroine whose every doing ‘is romantic’ (Samuel Pepys); as being ‘so distracted… that there are many soberer people in Bedlam’ (Lady Dorothy Temple); as looking like ‘a devil in a phantom masquerade’ (King Charles II); as ‘the great atheistical philosophraster’ (anonymous 17th-century gossip writer); as ‘a picture of foolish nobility’ (Horace Walpole); as ‘a giant cucumber’ (Virginia Woolf); as a ‘crack-brained, bird-witted… fantastical… crazy duchess’ (Woolf again) and as ‘the empress and authoress of a whole world’ (herself).

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