Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The Paris Review

    The Royally Radical Life of Margaret Cavendish

    by Michael Robbins Apr 15, 2019 5 minutes

    Peter Lely, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1665. Public domain.

    To Virginia Woolf, she was “a giant cucumber” choking the roses and carnations in an otherwise orderly garden of seventeenth-century literature. Several of her contemporaries felt similarly. Samuel Pepys found her “dress so antick, and her deportment so ordinary, that I do not like her at all.” Dorothy Osborne said of her that “there were many soberer People in Bedlam,” while Mary Evelyn was “surprised to find so much extravagancy and vanity in any person not confined within four walls.”

    This was the Margaret Cavendish I first encountered, through Woolf’s exquisitely savage portrait in The Common Reader:

    Nevertheless, though her philosophies are futile, and her plays intolerable, and her verses mainly dull, the vast bulk of the Duchess is leavened by a vein of authentic fire. One cannot help following the lure of her erratic and lovable

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The Paris Review

    The Paris Review35 min read
    An Eye In The Throat
    My father answers the phone. He is twenty-three years old, and, as everyone does in the nineties, he picks up the receiver without knowing who is calling. People call all day long, and my parents pick up and say, “Hello?” and then people say, “It’s C
    The Paris Review1 min read
    Credits
    Cover: Courtesy of Nicolas Party and the Modern Institute /Toby Webster Ltd. Page 12, courtesy of Alice Notley; pages 32, 36, 39, 42, 45, 48, 52, 55, 56, courtesy of Jhumpa Lahiri; page 59, photograph by Marco Delogu, courtesy of Jhumpa Lahiri; pages
    The Paris Review6 min read
    Consecutive Preterite
    1.That summer I learned Biblical Hebrewwith Christian women heaving themselvestoward ministry one brick building at a time.We got along well, they and I and our teacher,a religious studies graduate student who spenteight hours a day transmitting the

    Related