ABSTRACT
In her essay, ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf celebrates the creative wit and intelligence of the ‘harebrained, fantastical’ Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. She laments the fact that the Duchess was unfairly depreciated by her contemporaries like Dorothy Osborne or Samuel Pepys as ‘the crazy Duchess [who] became a bogey to frighten away clever girls with’ and was never acknowledged for her wit and intelligence. 1 Virginia Woolf herself though has only limited esteem for the actual literary accomplishment of Cavendish and writes:
Margaret too might have been a poet: in our day all that activity would have turned a wheel of some sort. As it was, what could bind, tame or civilise for human use that wild, generous, untutored intelligence? It poured itself out, higgledy-piggledy, in torrents of rhyme and prose, poetry and philosophy which stand congealed in quartos and folios that nobody ever reads. […] What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind! as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death. 2
