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It was no easy task to be a female natural philosopher or poet in seventeenthcentury England. A preface to Poems, and Fancies expresses both Margaret Cavendish ’s self-doubt and her justification for writing: she wrote in verse, she explained , because “Errour might better passe there, then in Prose” and “Fiction is not given for Truth but Pastime.” But she feared, “My Atomes will be as small Pastime, as themselves: for nothing can be less then an Atome. But my desire that they should please the Readers, is as big as the World they make; and my Feares are of the same bulk; yet my Hopes fall to a single Atome agen: and so shall I remaine an unsettled Atome or a confus’d heape, till I heare my Censure. If I be prais’d, it fixes them; but if I am condemn’d, I shall be annihilated to nothing: but my Ambition is such, as I would either be a World, or nothing.”1 The world Cavendish intended to create was her book. In the last of her prefatory material, she pleads with her readers that if they do not like her book, “Disturb her not, let her in quiet dye.”2 The book itself is figured as female and indeed is Cavendish’s progeny: “Condemne me not for making such a coyle/About my Book, alas it is my Childe.”3 Cavendish often thought in correspondences: thus, she is an atom, a creator, and a mother; likewise, her book is a world, a creation, and a child. The legitimacy of her work results from the author being, in some sense, both the form and matter of her work, both the progenitor and the progeny. In early modern England, female imagination was supposed to affect the appearance of the child; Cavendish wanted her conceptions to be beautiful and not monstrous.4 Her children took many forms, showing her readers many worlds. In Poems, and Fancies, creation is conceived as the product of a female Nature. In its companion piece, Philosophicall Fancies, the malleability of matter can produce other worlds where people are made of flowers or iron and where rocks and animals may possess reason. All of Cavendish’s worlds are inhabited, so in Poems, and Fancies c h a p t e r t w o Cavendish’s Early Atomism BA C av e n d i s h ’s E a r l y A t o m i s m 35 atoms are analogized to fairies. In her later works, there will be realms peopled by hybrid beings, worlds existing both below and above the earth, in the oceans and in space. Inspired by the new lands and the new science discovered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and by poets’ and philosophers’ perceptions of the new realities, Cavendish’s fancy produced multiple books and multiple possibilities. In creating other worlds, Cavendish defined a space where her fancy could discover and envision nature. It is not surprising, therefore, that Cavendish’s first work began with a cosmogony based on a material creator using living matter to construct the world. Most commentators, including myself in an earlier discussion, have followed Robert Kargon in his interpretation that Cavendish “expounded an Epicurean atomism at once so extreme and fanciful that she shocked the enemies of atomism, and embarrassed its friends.”5 Epicurean atoms are simply material; they possess motion and figure but not life. Both moderns and ancients viewed such a conception with repugnance. Pierre Gassendi, Newcastle’s guest in 1647 and Thomas Hobbes’s friend, spent many hundreds of pages in his Syntagma Philosophicum (1655) trying to rehabilitate this ancient philosophy and integrate it with Christianity.6 Hobbes was often accused of being an Epicurean and, once again, was doubtful intellectual company for Cavendish to keep. But Cavendish was not a classic Epicurean. By 1653 she had already embraced a vitalist theory of matter, which becomes explicit in Philosophicall Fancies, which she intended to publish in the same volume as Poems, and Fancies. Cavendish’s vitalism was as idiosyncratic as the rest of her philosophy; she reconfigured chemical ideas of vital heat and seminal principles into a material philosophy that credits matter not only with life and self-movement but also with self-consciousness and thought. And, in addition to her embrace of vitalism, Cavendish deviated from the Epicurean norm by integrating theological motifs into Poems, and Fancies and all her scientific works. Cavendish’s Epicurean tendencies were...

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