ABSTRACT
EVER SINCE THE seventeenth century, critics of Cavendish’s writing have consistently linked her unprecedentedly self-assertive stance as a woman writer to supposed psychological eccentricity. Pepys admits to having “stayed at home reading the ridiculous history of my Lord Newcastle, wrote by his wife, which shows her to be a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman”.[1] Another contemporary, Dorothy Osborne, instructs William Temple that he “need not send me my Lady Newcastle’s book at all, for I have seen it, and am satisfied there are many soberer people in Bedlam”.[2] A significant portion of twentieth-century criticism is pervaded by a similar sense of the centrality of Cavendish’s putative mental irregularities. For Jean Gagen, Cavendish is an “odd but lovable author” whose reiterated desire to achieve “fame” through publication registers a “neurotic pride” arising out of her professed shyness. [3] Meanwhile, Gilbert & Gubar construe her as a sort of paradigmatic madwoman in the attic of literary
history, claiming that “finally the contradictions between her attitude toward her gender and her sense of her own vocation seem really to have made her in some sense ‘mad’”.[4] This study aims to challenge such approaches by arguing that Cavendish’s unusually forthright presentation of herself as a female author is not the product of psychological factors but of cultural and historical conditions, specifically those of Interregnum royalism.
