Margaret Cavendish

Description

An eclectic collection of poetry by one of 17th century England's boldest, smartest, and independent women. "What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind!" Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own. Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was a groundbreaking woman writer--a utopian visionary, a scientist, a science-fiction pioneer. She interacted with Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes. And she produced startlingly modern poems unlike anything else published in the seventeenth century for their mixture of scientific and proto-Blakean vision, their deep sympathy with the non-human world, and their feminist passion.

Margaret Cavendish (1623 - 1673) was an aristocrat, philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction-writer, and playwright. Her utopian romance, The Blazing World, is one of the earliest example of science fiction and she is unique for having published extensively on the subjects of natural philosophy and early modern science. She was also the first woman to attend a meeting at the Royal Society of London in 1667 where she criticized and engaged with the members Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, and Robert Boyle. Michael Robbins is a poet and literary critic. He is the author of the poetry collections Alien vs. Predator and The Second Sex and his poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Harper's, and elsewhere. His critical work has appeared in several publications, including London Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, and Spin. His forthcoming critical work, Equipment for Living, will publish in July 2017. He lives in Brooklyn.

"Virginia Woolf famously described Margaret Cavendish as a cucumber choking the roses. To my mind, Cavendish is the whole garden, prickly and wild and fresh. With no formal education, her fierce and elemental imagination tuned itself to atoms and rabbits, trees and invisible worlds-it vibrates across these pages." -Danielle Dutton, author of Margaret the First: A Novel "Margaret Cavendish clearly established herself as an alternative voice of sceptical wit and humane enquiry, unique among seventeenth-century women, and prophesying many others. There is something magnificent about her irrepressible eccentricity. In her own fashion she survived a social revolution, and bore witness to a scientific one." -Richard Holmes