Margaret The First

“I am as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be; though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First.”

When Margaret Cavendish addressed the Royal Society, Samuel Pepys recorded that her dress was “so antic and her deportment so unordinary, that I do not like her at all”. And indeed, here vividly reimagined by Danielle Dutton, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional 17th-century duchess is wholly “unordinary”, and all the better for it.

Exiled to Paris at the start of the English Civil War, Margaret meets and marries William Cavendish and, with his encouragement, begins publishing volumes of poetry and philosophy, which soon become the talk of the town in London. After Cromwell’s defeat, upon their return to England, Margaret’s infamy grows. She causes controversy wherever she goes, once attending the theatre with breasts bared, and earns herself the nickname “Mad Madge”.

Yet while scorned by many, to others Margaret is a visionary, and to later readers – including Virginia Woolf – she was to become an early precursor of feminism. She was the first woman to speak at the Royal Society – and the last for 200 years – and the first to write explicitly for publication. Unjustly neglected by history, Margaret the First – as she styled herself – was a bright, shining paradox. Here, she is brought intimately and memorably to life, tumbling pell-mell across the pages of this invigorating depiction of a woman whose ambitions, and marriage, were often centuries ahead of her time.