Pure Wit

Starred review from November 6, 2023
Journalist Peacock debuts with an excellent biography of 17th-century English author and “proto-feminist” Margaret Cavendish (née Lucas). Born in 1623, Margaret grew up in a wealthy family whose Royalist sympathies during the English Civil War inspired her at age 20 to join Queen Henrietta Maria’s court as a lady-in-waiting. She fled with the queen to France in 1644, where she married William Cavendish, a disgraced Royalist general who retreated to France after a humiliating defeat on the battlefield, and later returned with him to England after Charles II’s restoration in 1660. Highlighting the trailblazing fiction, poetry, and philosophical and scientific treatises Cavendish wrote before her sudden death in 1673, Peacock credits her 1666 novel, The Blazing World, in which a young woman becomes empress of an alternate realm, as “one of the earliest works of science fiction.” Peacock captures Cavendish’s larger-than-life persona (an amusing scene recounts when Cavendish, accepting the Royal Society’s reluctant invitation for her to become the first woman to visit their headquarters, arrived in a “decadent dress... followed by her troupe of attendant ladies as crowds clamoured to see her”) and perceptively teases out her contradictions, noting that despite Cavendish’s “belief that marriage was an oppressive form of bondage,” she lacked “interest in the existence of people who were kept in true slavery.” It’s a nuanced look at the life of a complicated female trailblazer.