Margaret the First
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Danielle Dutton’s stunning new novel dramatises the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy but audacious seventeenth-century duchess who was the first woman in England to write for publication — volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction — a woman whose ambitions were centuries ahead of her time.
As one of the queen’s attendants, Margaret Lucas was exiled to France at the start of the English Civil War. In Paris, she married William Cavendish, an aristocrat who encouraged both her writing and her desire for a career — a singular relationship. After Cromwell’s defeat, Margaret and William returned to England, where her work, behaviour, and sense of style — including once attending the theater in a topless gown — earned her both infamy and fame. At the dawn of daily newspapers, ‘Mad Madge’ was a tabloid celebrity, yet she was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of London, a mainstay of the Scientific Revolution, and the last for another two hundred years.
Margaret the First is an intimate portrait of a woman whose life was a brilliant paradox, but who is now largely unknown. Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, the novel also revels in the physicality of a garden or a gown, and turns tender in its rendering of family and marital ties.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dutton's remarkable second novel is as vividly imaginative as its subject, the 17th-century English writer and eccentric Margaret Cavendish. Even as a shy young girl, Margaret Lucas covets fame and writes prolifically. Years later, she is an attendant to the queen, and when the English Civil War begins, Margaret flees with the court to Paris, where she meets and marries the aristocratic William Cavendish. Blossoming in an intellectual milieu that includes Descartes and Dryden, she begins to write even more seriously. Back in England after the war ends, she publishes wildly unconventional books to a mixture of admiration and scorn, refusing to write anonymously like other women of her time, or to let her lack of formal education silence her. Though Dutton doesn't shy away from the "various and extravagant" antics (such as attending the theater in a topless gown) that earned her subject notoriety and the nickname "Mad Madge," her Margaret is a woman of fierce vitality, creativity, and courage. Incorporating lines from Cavendish herself as well as Virginia Woolf, whose essays introduced Dutton to Cavendish, this novel is indeed reminiscent of Woolf's Orlando in its sensuous appreciation of the world and unconventional approach to fictionalized biography. Dutton's boldness, striking prose, and skill at developing an idiosyncratic narrative should introduce her to the wider audience she deserves.
