I, Margaret

In the preface to her utopian romance The Description of a New World Called the Blazing World (1666), Margaret Cavendish wrote:

I am not Covetous, but as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be; which is the cause, That though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavour to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Cesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own.

This remarkable statement provides the title of Danielle Dutton’s biographical novel Margaret the First and, furthermore, has been the defining image of Cavendish’s critical heritage. In this passage, Cavendish both acknowledges her political disenfranchisement as a woman and defiantly declares her creative autonomy: in writing women may achieve the freedom they are denied elsewhere. The legacy of this bold stance, however, has been mixed. This kind of ambition may be admirable, but in a woman—both in Cavendish’s day and our own—it can be seen as prideful and unseemly. What gives Cavendish, or any woman, the right to take up space in this way?

Dutton’s Margaret the First is a response to and revision of this portrait of Margaret Cavendish. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay on the problem of “women and fiction,” Margaret Cavendish is used as an illustration of the challenges faced by women writers. Cavendish was, in Woolf’s words, a “bogey to frighten clever girls with,” a flesh and blood embodiment of Woolf’s imaginary creation, Shakespeare’s sister, the brilliant, and impossible, female poet who could not exercise her gifts. Dutton’s novel, like many scholarly treatments of Cavendish over the past three decades, provides an implicit, and sometimes explicit, response to Woolf’s Cavendish. The Margaret Cavendish of Margaret the First is the kind of artist that, for Woolf, women could not yet become because they lacked political and economic independence. By alternately pulling apart and conflating life and work—by engaging, in other words, the affordances of biofiction—Dutton writes a Cavendish of incandescence, a true poet.

Margaret the First begins as a first-person narrative of Margaret’s adolescence and adulthood. Individual sections are labeled with the places Margaret lived during the first 37 years of her life: Colchester, Oxford, Paris, Antwerp, London, and Antwerp again. In this first part of the novel, Margaret moves from the narrow world of her tight-knit gentry family where, as the youngest child, she was indulged in her eccentricities, to Court, exile, and finally marriage to William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle and disgraced Royalist general. The first half of the novel follows the familiar pattern of a young person’s introduction to the broader world, but though the narrative takes place during some of the most tumultuous years in British history, the plot, such as it is, remains tightly focused on Margaret’s internal life. Following closely the outline of Cavendish’s 1656 autobiography “A True Relation of My Birth and Breeding,” Margaret the First is primarily concerned with Margaret’s self-creation as a writer. In a detail that Dutton takes over from Cavendish’s autobiography, Margaret is a writer from childhood, immersed from a very young age in worlds of her own creation. As a young girl, she discovers an invisible world in the movement of river water:

A summer afternoon, age nine, sitting first beneath the honeysuckle, then moving nearer the brook to observe butterflies that gather at pale daffodils, a dead sparrow spotted along the way, and a sonnet begun upon the ability of a sparrow to suffer pain, I, Margaret—Queen of the Tree-people—discovered an invisible world. There on the surface of the water, river-foam bubbles encased a jubilant cosmos. Whole civilizations lasted for only a moment!

Passages such as this provide an innocent origin story...