The Literary Invention of Margaret Cavendish by Lara Dodds (review)

Lara Dodds begins her excellent study with one of Margaret Cavendish’s well-known claims of originality. In 1653, at the start of her life as an author, Cavendish wrote “I never read, nor heard of any English Booke to Instruct me” (qtd. in Dodds 1). The statement is a bit puzzling, and playful at the least—has she really not encountered any English books capable of instructing her, whatever that might mean? Cavendish was fond of making such claims: in a prefatory verse to her 1662 Playes, she wrote, for instance: “All the materials in my head did grow, / All is my own, and nothing do I owe” (Cavendish A8r). And yet late in life, once she was famous—or more accurately, notorious—as an author, Cavendish would at times ostentatiously display her engagement with others’ works, particularly in her elaborate commentaries on natural philosophy (the 1668 Grounds of Natural Philosophy has a prefatory epistle addressed “To All the Universities of Europe” for example). Books in English were in fact the principal means for Cavendish’s eclectic brand of intellectual self-fashioning, yet she was not usually forthcoming about her debts to others, and most notably her debts to literary precursors. This makes Dodds’s detective work in The Literary Invention of Margaret Cavendish especially revelatory and welcome. In an age struggling between inherited emulation models of authorship based on common-placing and imitation and new claims for the value of natural genius (associated with Jonson and Shakespeare respectively in their different paths of Restoration reception), Cavendish proves to be particularly symptomatic in her own hesitations over the nature of originality. Her voluminous writings, published without any of the rhetorical polish she was prevented from acquiring through formal education, provide us with a fascinating optic for observing in detail one idiosyncratic reader’s engagement with majors works of literature and natural philosophy from the 1650s through the 1670s.

Dodds’s book joins the ever-expanding set of innovative studies of what we could call “early modern information management”—those recent studies that have recovered, for instance, the importance of common-placing and note-taking, indexing, marginal and other kinds of page marking, primitive card-cataloguing, pin-holing for letter hanging, new methods of information retrieval (from the mind or from printed pages), and the associated debates over originality and imitation. Dodds argues that in her creative and eclectic browsing and her brand of proto-social annotation, her shifting willingness and unwillingness to acknowledge debts, Cavendish “might be seen as a prototype of the modern reader” (223). In six chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue, Dodds patiently reconstructs Cavendish through her reading, remarking, and self-placement—showing how Cavendish in her own fashion, but much like Sir Philip Sidney or Ben Jonson before her, “selects the tradition to which she aspires” (7). While the eccentric Cavendish who disowned imitation and prided herself on singularity is most immediately appealing to our late-modern individualist sensibilities, Dodds reminds us how much Cavendish owed to the written sources around her. Instead of taking her claims of nearly autonomous self-fashioning at face value, Dodds shows that “Cavendish’s writing may be appreciated more fully when read in dialogue with the English literary tradition” (58). To credit Cavendish’s literary influences is at the same time to reinsert Cavendish into the tradition of women’s writing, a tradition her self-proclaimed singularity might deny her.

Cavendish had the financial means to be a constant and wide-ranging reader. She read the poetry of Jonson, Donne, and others; she has been shown in previous studies to have owned and read both the second and third folios of Shakespeare; she read and replied in print to works by Francis Bacon, and to natural philosophical treatises by Robert Hooke, Henry Power, Joseph Glanvill, and Robert Boyle. She read Hobbes’s English works, met him occasionally (he worked for the extended Cavendish household...