Margaret the First

Author(s): Danielle Dutton

Novel | Historical | Read our reviews!

Margaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional seventeenth-century duchess. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when "being a writer" was not an option open to women. As one of the Queen's attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, she was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. As the English Civil War raged on, Margaret met and married William Cavendish, who encouraged her writing and her desire for a career. After the War, her work earned her both fame and infamy in England; at the dawn of daily newspapers, she was "Mad Madge," an original tabloid celebrity. Yet Margaret 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 very much a contemporary novel set in the past. Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, it is a gorgeous and wholly new approach to imagining the life of a historical woman.

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was a poet, philosopher, essayist and playwright in the 17th century. Eccentric, erratically shy but desiring of fame, she was both shunned and celebrated by the aristocracy and the thinkers of the time. I kept picking up this slim volume with its attractive cover and its attractive turn of phrase, and insights into a woman’s lot in the 17th century. “One morning I woke to find I’d stained my sheets and thought I’d split in two. There followed a quiet clamor: new linens, removal from the nursery, and no one explaining why. Until a maid, in secret, provided useful counsel: Inscribe veronica in ink on the ball of your left thumb, to decrease the irksome flow. Stunned I fled to my room, only to find that my mother awaited me inside. 'You must wear chicken-skin gloves on your hands each night.'” And with those chicken-skin gloves, I was hooked. This is a fascinating fictional view of Margaret Cavendish, who courted fame and won it. Taken seriously by some, ridiculed by others, she was both shy and flamboyant (her fabulous outfits had London gossiping). The book opens with her childhood in the country estate of a royalist family. As trouble brews – Cromwell and the Civil War- Margaret goes into exile as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria. In Paris, she is courted by William Cavendish, and in their early married life, they mix with European thinkers and other exiled intellectuals. Margaret is not content to be a wife and bystander and, encouraged by William, begins on a series of plays and novellas. Some are treatises on being female, philosophical treatises, discussions about science, while others are fantastical stories – the most famous of these being The Blazing World, which is seen by some academics as the forerunner to science fiction. Danielle Dutton captures Margaret and all her complexities and inconsistencies perfectly. The first part of the book often reads like diary entries giving us an intimate portrayal of her state of mind, her frustrations and fascinations. In the later parts, which take us back to England (the royal family back in the seat of power), Dutton changes her writing style and we look upon Margaret with all her foibles - her egocentric nature, knack of offending with her arrogance, bouts of doubt and sense of isolation - as well as allowing us a glance at how she was viewed by others. Known as ‘Mad Madge’, she courted attention - at times London society couldn’t get enough of her – whether for her ideas or just titillation. And while she was viewed as a peculiarity, she was also the first woman to attend the Royal Society, and in her 49 years published 21 volumes of work, some of which garnered serious attention. Dutton’s fictional account of this fascinating character is lively and absorbing. 
{STELLA}


 


 


 


 


>> "A small miracle of imaginative sympathy."



>> "Prickly, shy, arrogant, imaginative, contradictory, curious, confused, melancholic, ambitious, restless."



>> A Description of the New World, Called the Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish (which inspired The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt).



>> The philosophy of Margaret Cavendish.



>> And now in PowerPoint.



>> A sampler of Margaret Cavendish's works



>> Danielle Dutton: "One of the most original and wonderfully weird prose stylists of our time".


 


>> Dutton is also a publisher at the very excellent The Dorothy Project.


 


 


 


Product Information

Danielle Dutton is the author of a collection of prose pieces, Attempts at a Life, and a novel, SPRAWL, which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award. She also wrote the text for Here Comes Kitty- a comic opera, an artist book of collages by Richard Kraft. Her fiction has appeared in Harper's, BOMB, Fence, Noon, and other periodicals. Dutton, who grew up in Central California, holds a PhD from the University of Denver and a MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the founder of the publishing house Dorothy, and teaches at Washington University in St Louis, where she lives with her husband and son.

General Fields

  • : 9781925321654
  • : Scribe Publications
  • : Scribe Publications
  • : 0.268
  • : January 2017
  • : 204mm X 138mm X 20mm
  • : January 2017
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Danielle Dutton
  • : Hardback
  • : 813.6