ABSTRACT
This essay explores the myth-making function of archives, identifying the tensions and convergences between scholarly narratives and fictionalized biographies in readings of two contemporary novels featuring Margaret Cavendish. Both Danielle Dutton’s Margaret the First and Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, A Novel feature the taint of madness that has haunted the Duchess of Newcastle’s reputation for centuries, while offering radically different diagnoses and etiologies. By examining the origins and stubborn staying power of the now discredited moniker “Mad Madge,” the nickname by which Cavendish was once believed to have been known to her contemporaries, this essay seeks to reconsider the novelizing and pathologizing tendencies that can drive both scholarly and fictional treatments of early modern women.
