ABSTRACT
This paper discusses imagining the mind as a central literary strategy throughout Cavendish’s works. I point out that she has frequent recourse to this strategy in her poems, plays, prose fiction and philosophy, and suggest that this strategy helps legitimate her writing in physiological as well as rhetorical terms, as a process of playful mental and social ordering. I also suggest that her readers are ambiguously implicated in this playfulness, invited to accede to the ordering power of Cavendish’s own mind, or to laugh at the extravagance of that imagined and imagining power.
