‘Under a Heap of Dust They Buried Lye, within a Vault of Some Small Library'

Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) spent much of her adult life attempting to redefine the boundaries of the library by calling attention to the ways in which this space reinforced the binary oppositions that she was relentlessly unsettling in her published writings and her private life. Wildly prolific, spectacularly dressed, and always controversial, Cavendish sent copies of her works to the major libraries in England and Europe. Her career, both during the Interregnum and following the restoration of the monarchy in England, is marked by a deliberate attempt to enter into libraries on her own terms. However, as my ensuing discussion of her writing shows, Cavendish represents libraries as spaces of disorder and dust. She prefers living, breathing intellect, even though she values the role that libraries play in supplying social value to the material contained in them.