Introduction

After nearly three decades of feminist literary criticism, decades which have seen the recovery of a wide-ranging canon of women’s writing, from the middle ages through to the twentieth century a collection of essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle hardly needs an apology. Cavendish was arguably the first Englishwoman to fashion herself as an author – a woman who desired, and achieved, publication on an unprecedented scale, and in a wide variety of literary genres. Her pursuit of literary fame and reputation was vigorous and startlingly self-conscious. She wrote an epistolary dedication addressed ‘To all the Universities in Europe,’ ¹ and presented the handsome folio volumes of her works to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and to prominent members of the nobility. ² She maintained an argumentative philosophical correspondence with Joseph Glanvill and openly criticised the ‘experimental philosophy’ of the Royal Society and the philosophical writings of Thomas Hobbes and Henry More . ³ And yet – as Kate Lilley has noted – Cavendish’s works have frequently been interpreted as ‘deformed in various ways: chaotic, old-fashioned, uneven, contradictory and insane.’ ⁴ Perhaps more than any other early modern woman writer Cavendish has prompted critical disclaimers, qualifications, and apologies. The necessity for these apologetics is not entirely clear. The unimpeachably canonical Sir Thomas Browne, whose style was condemned by his contemporary Sir Kenelm Digby for its ‘wilde fantasticke qualities and moods,’ ⁵ does not require elaborate contemporary apologetics – there is no ‘Sir Tom o’ Bedlam’ label to negotiate, as ‘Mad Madge’ must be repeatedly negotiated by Cavendish scholars. It is as if at some unconscious level of modern apologetics, beneath the principled complaints of women’s unequal access to education, and consequent ‘lack’ of literary and philosophical mastery, we are still negotiating Margaret Cavendish’s writings as transgressive, and thus in need of justification.