How a cross-dressing, bullet-dodging duchess blazed a trail for sci-fi
“My ambition is not only to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole world,” wrote Margaret Cavendish in the epilogue to her psychedelically bizarre, endlessly compulsive novel The Blazing World. It was a bold statement of intent, but not without cause. Cavendish’s 1666 work is one of the earliest pieces of science fiction in English; the first to imagine a new world, and the first to be written by a woman. She was the “authoress” of a whole new genre.
Elements of her novel – a parallel world accessed by futuristic golden submarines; races of animal-humans; scientific experiments which reflected the debates of the day – sound more like the outlandish imaginations of 19th and 20th century sci-fi: a little-known masterpiece by H G Wells, an unpublished manuscript of Aldous Huxley, or a misplaced volume by Jules Verne. Even the early feminism of her work (its “blazing” utopia governed by an all-powerful Empress), sounds like something of another age: a forgotten novel by that other female pioneer of science fiction, Mary Shelley.
Born in 1623 – this year marks her 400th anniversary – Cavendish, first Duchess of Newcastle, was beyond her time. Growing up amid the English Civil War, Cavendish (née Lucas) came from a Royalist family. Aged 20, she joined Queen Henrietta Maria as a lady-in-waiting after her family home had been stormed by Parliamentary forces. As the violence of the wars became more intense, she followed her into exile in France, where she later met her husband: William Cavendish, the would-be Duke of Newcastle, some three decades her senior.
After an early life of battlefields, exile and dangerous sea-journeys (on one occasion, she and the other ladies-in-waiting came under fire as they tried to cross the Channel), Cavendish spent the rest of her life fighting wars with her pen. She became one of the earliest women to publish under her own name (at a point where writers of both genders often shunned print publication to preserve their modesty).
She wrote about everything, from poems on the ravages of the Civil War to plays about female-only separatist utopias; from tracts about early modern science to torrents of philosophy puzzling out how the world works. She was a latter-day Renaissance woman, and a true radical. She switched between genres with the flick of a pen, and was as comfortable weighing in on the nature of the universe – her theory of “vitalist materialism” was in debate with those of Hobbes and Descartes – as she was demonstrating her extreme love of fashion.
Cavendish was a true Restoration celebrity: in his diaries, Samuel Pepys describes following her around London with mobs of obsessive fans, fighting to catch a glimpse of her and her outrageous clothes (“the whole story of this lady is a romance”, he wrote after seeing her for a fraction of a second). On one occasion, another spectator observed, she attended the premiere of her husband’s play wearing a dress that was so low-cut it left her breasts “all laid out to view”. To top it off, she’d accessorised with “scarlet trimmed nipples”.
The Blazing World represents the pinnacle of Cavendish’s kaleidoscopic imagination. Initially appearing to be a prose romance – a girl is kidnapped by a marauding sailor while picking shells on the beach – it quickly becomes more genre-defying: she is rescued from the kidnap (and implied rape) by the act of a vengeful god who causes “such a tempest” which diverts the boat into the North Pole. Here, in a land of ice and desolation, all the sailors die of cold: the girl is only kept alive by the “light of her beauty, the heat of her youth”. Her good looks allow her to witness the moment that the boat crosses over from the known world of Earth into another joined to it at the pole.
Here, she is rescued by “bear-like creatures”, who take her deeper into this new terrain: she crosses rivers and seas, past bird-men and fox-men, until she reaches the “Emperor of their World”. He believes her to be a “Goddess” and gives her the “absolute power to rule and govern… as she pleased”.
Cavendish’s story prefigures books from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (published in 1726 – 60 years later), to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy with its interest in parallel worlds in the Arctic. Science fiction is often thought of as rooted in 19th-century interest in Martians and industrial, mechanical developments. The truth is far more interesting.
When Cavendish initially published The Blazing World, it appeared at the back of a different volume of her writing: her Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy. This work was a piece of feisty academic disagreement. In the months after the Restoration in 1660, the brave men of English science had founded the Royal Society: an academy dedicated to the pursuit of the “new science”. Their endeavours focused on empirical experimentation and inductive reasoning. It was the age of experiments with air-pumps, of the mysteries of the microscope, and a belief that nothing lay outside the bounds of scholarly pursuit.
In a post-Newtonian scientific world, and where science is tied to empirical experimentation, it can be hard to take disagreements with what we now think of as the “scientific method” seriously. But Cavendish – herself a scientist and a philosopher – took umbrage with the bold claims of the men of the Royal Society: for her, their belief that everything could be known through observation and experimentation seemed too hubristic, too close to the claims of Puritan reformers that had torn through the country during the Civil War. She argued that microscopes could never get to the truth of the universe, but could, instead, distort it.
The Blazing World posited a humorous, fictionalised version of her argument: the young girl – now an “Empress” – puts all the animal-men to work in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Each type of animal-man is a different type of scholar: the bear-men her experimental philosophers, the bird-men her astronomers, and the satyrs her “Galenic physicians”. When speaking to these creatures, she echoes the argument in her scientific writing, and reprimands their reliance on microscopes and telescopes as being “mere deluders”. In writing herself a whole new world, Cavendish had given herself the best role within it: it is quite clear that she herself is the “Empress”. At its heart, The Blazing World is not just fiction about science – the trappings of discovery as an exciting backdrop for a plot – but something far more novel: an inventive marriage of scientific thought and a prose-romance romp.
Cavendish was not alone in this new genre: she was preceded by Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) – a utopian novel about an island in the Pacific Ocean – and by Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moon (1638) about a Spaniard who, with the aid of a carriage pulled by a group of wild geese, is able to reach the outer edges of the solar system. But The Blazing World is the first novel which imagines an entirely new world: something beyond the known solar system.
Cavendish wasn’t just content to write a new world and a new genre, though: The Blazing World is a work of unusual sexual freedom. After the “Empress” decides she wants a scribe to write down her theories, she alights upon the “spirit” of the “Duchess of Newcastle”. The two women share spiritual, “immaterial” kisses, and even have something approaching a threesome in the “seraglio” of Cavendish’s husband, William’s, body. Only Cavendish could mix discourse on microscopes with a masturbatory, sapphic fantasy. Why, then, if Cavendish was so groundbreaking, is she not lauded as the “Empress and authoress” of a whole new genre today?
The answer lies in how she was received in her own time. Despite publishing so many volumes of poetry, plays, philosophy and science, she was better known for her flashy celebrity. When she visited the Royal Society in 1667, she was the first woman to do so, and some three centuries before they admitted their first female member. But more attention was paid to what she wore (a dramatically long dress and a wide-brimmed masculine hat, with a gaggle of attendant ladies to hold her train and a carriage accessorised with “many a tassel”) than what she said. Cattily, Pepys remarked that she said “nothing that was worth hearing”.
Despite her contributions to intellectual debate – she brought theories of “atomism” (that is, the whole world is composed of tiny atoms that move at random) over from Europe – she was mostly talked about for her appearance. She was famed as a cross-dresser; a fashion rebel, who stunned London society while clad in dizzying ensembles of black velvet and silver. On one occasion, as gossip would have it, she was even reprimanded at court for dressing her servants in “affected velvet caps”. Rather than being celebrated as an intellectual, she is remembered as little more than a clothes-horse.
That reputation is better, though, than other gossip which surrounded her. After Cavendish’s first book, Poems and Fancies, was published in 1653 – when she had briefly returned to England during her exile – many simply believed that she was “mad” for her decision, as a woman, to write in public. One woman, Dorothy Osborne, quipped that “there are many soberer people in Bedlam”. Katherine Jones, sister of a member of the Royal Society, echoed the remark, saying that Cavendish “escaped Bedlam only by being too rich to be sent thither”. Mary Evelyn – wife of the writer John Evelyn – huffed that she was “surprised to find so much extravagancy and vanity in any person not confined within four walls”. Such vanity had nothing to do with her extravagant displays, only her decision to publish a book with her name on the cover.
With all this chatter, how did Cavendish continue to write, think and publish? Fighting in her corner – writing poems to print at the beginning of her books, and sending out copies to his intellectual friends – was her husband William. He had married Margaret ostensibly with the idea of having more sons – but no children followed, probably because of her medical problems. Margaret’s books took their stead: with love and encouragement, William shepherded their entry into the world, and even called them her “newborn” fancies.
Cavendish died in 1673, leaving behind “no issue” other than her books, as the epitaph above her grave in Westminster Abbey still reads today. In the centuries since her death, her reputation has fared little better than in her lifetime: she became the “mad Madge” of legend; a ridiculous figure that allowed historians to laugh at the pretensions of women who sought an intellectual life. Even in the 20th century, Virginia Woolf found it possible to poke fun at her, calling her a “giant cucumber” and a “bogey to frighten clever girls with”.
In the 21st century, this has, thankfully, begun to change: Cavendish is the influence behind Danielle Dutton’s marvellous, inventive novel Margaret the First (2016), and The Blazing World lent its name to Siri Hustvedt’s 2014 tale of a female painter who struggles to be taken seriously because of her gender.
Cavendish was preoccupied by a desire for “glorious fame”, but she wasn’t delusional about her place in history. In later years, she admitted that her works may “not in this age take”, but held them forth for “another age”. Surely that time has come. Let’s read her without the weight of censorious gossip, and revel in her wit and unashamed ambition. Tell everyone: a new Empress is about to be crowned.
Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish by Francesca Peacock (Bloomsbury, ￡27.99) is published on Sept 14
