The Literary Invention of Margaret Cavendish by Lara Dodds, and: God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish ed. by Brandie R. Siegfried and Lisa T. Sarasohn (review)

Both of these works advance scholarship on Margaret Cavendish in significant and often remarkable ways. Lara Dodds provides the first book on the response of Cavendish to the literary traditions that influenced her. Although Cavendish frequently denied all such influence, and claimed she had read few other writers, Dodds demonstrates that her debts were many and her uses of these authors discriminating and full of implicit commentary. The Literary Invention of Margaret Cavendish brings to light a number of allusions, for instance, to Marlowe, Donne, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton. The Afterword examines her infrequent and generally negative references to other women writers. One compelling thesis of the book is that the tendency of scholars to approach Cavendish’s works as autobiography has kept them from recognizing her engagement with literary traditions. Cavendish’s insistence on her singularity is assessed as a strategy for protection against misogynist attacks. The book also considers Cavendish as a source of evidence about gendered reading practices in contrast to other studies on this subject, focused on men. Sometimes the discussion of reading practices interferes with a thorough analysis of the significance of literary influence. Nevertheless this is an important book whose notable findings should promote future study.

The first chapter analyzes Cavendish’s reading of Plutarch, and her willingness to criticize the earlier humanist tradition of reading for action, examined by Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton. Dodds notes Cavendish’s skepticism about the veracity of Plutarch’s stories as well as her questioning of the ethics of his characters, including Cato, Aspasia, and Lucretia. At times Cavendish seems completely determined by gender norms, shocked that anyone would take Aspasia seriously, given her sexual liaison with Pericles. In other cases, Cavendish reaches unexpected conclusions. The evidence about Plutarch comes primarily from Sociable Letters (1664), which is largely fictional; nevertheless Dodds persuasively argues that letters were a comfortable arena for women to talk over their reading, given the strictures placed on it by religious and moral authorities. Cavendish’s letter-writer reports on an aggressive debate between multiple women on whether Lucretia killed herself because of chaste, wifely submission or out of arrogant pride. The writer calms the debaters down by asserting that the story of Lucretia may be an old wives’ tale. Although we might hope for more explicit resistance to the moral of the story, Dodds shows that we cannot assume that women responded to reading in the way male authorities hoped they would.

Chapter two takes up the allusions to, and imitation of, Donne by Cavendish and her husband William. Here William steals the show in a series of fascinating imitations of Donne’s poems on mutual love. William wrote his poems for Margaret during their courtship. Although Dodds seems to accept previous literary judgments that William was an inferior poet, the passages she quotes are compelling in terms of wit and poetic style. The Newcastle manuscript includes poetry by Donne as well as William’s imitations, and it deserves further attention. Dodds very persuasively argues that Margaret could never have responded in kind, given the rules of propriety, and offered instead letters about court life. Later in her career, however, Margaret cites Donne both as a literary authority and a model for metaphysical poetry. In a comparison of Donne’s “First Anniversary” and Cavendish’s “The World in an Eare-Ring,” Dodds argues that Cavendish’s poems on atomism and the plurality of worlds in Poems, and Fancies (1653) are metaphysical in a Donnean sense.

As an influence-study, the book is fascinating in the chapter on Milton, which considers Cavendish’s reinvention of “L’Allegro” and...