The Duchess of Newcastle writes two remarkable addenda

The name of one of the most exceptional Britons of the 17th century is almost unknown nowadays. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, chalked up many accomplishments in her 50-year life that would have been noteworthy even had she been born two centuries later. She was a scientist, philosopher, novelist, poet and playwright, sometimes combining two or more of these rôles in a single work. That she was able to achieve so much, despite the huge disadvantages she encountered in society on account of her sex, is testament to her brilliance and her unwillingness to accept that anything was impossible just because it had not been done before. This is certainly true of her autobiography – the first major secular memoir ever written by a woman. The fact that she also penned one of the very first works of a whole new genre of literature as something of an afterthought speaks volumes about the originality of her mind.

Cavendish was born Margaret Lucas in 1623, near Colchester in Essex, a child of two very wealthy parents. She was also a sister to a pair of fervent royalist brothers, a fact which, in those troubled times, was not necessarily a ticket to an easy life. After a childhood in which she was mainly self-taught (the presence of her tutors being ‘rather for formality than benefit’, as she put it), she became a maid of honour to Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I, accompanying her fleeing mistress into exile in France in 1644. There she met and married the much older William Cavendish, then Marquess of Newcastle.

The couple moved to Antwerp, where the new marchioness was introduced to thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes. She began taking lessons in natural philosophy (what, nowadays, we would call science), a subject for which she had an exceptional flair. By 1652, she had moved beyond mere Hobbesian or Cartesian worlds and had begun to collate her own thoughts on the subject in a series of books. Four years later she published a prose and verse collection called Nature’s Pictures Drawn by Fancie’s Pencil to the Life. It spawned the first of her two extraordinary addenda. This was titled A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life – the first non-religious autobiography penned by a woman in the secular realm.

She returned to England with her husband in 1660 at the restoration of the monarchy and continued to write prolifically (she would go on to have 23 books published, including plays and collections of poetry). Although she was an individual given to eccentricities and consequently the butt of many a joke, she became recognised as England’s first female scientist.

In 1666, by which time she had become a duchess, Cavendish published what would become the most well known of her half-dozen works on science, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. This was a broadside aimed at what she saw as the rather fusty and closed-minded natural philosophers of her day. Cavendish railed at the reliance on theories about the motion of atoms to explain the world, believing herself that all atoms were ‘animated with life and knowledge’. However, she was also one of the first natural philosophers to support Thomas Hobbes’ argument that theology had no place in the world of scientific endeavour. It is her casual addendum to Observations that cemented her legacy in the world of literature as well as science, even if she receives little recognition in either field today.

The work she presented as an appendix she titled The Blazing-World. It is arguably the precursor to the whole genre of science fiction. It is also one of the first British novels ever written – it was published 12 years before John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, 22 years before Aphra Behn’s masterpiece Oroonoko, and a full 53 years before Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

It is appropriate that a book with such a title should come out in the year of the Great Fire of London, but its story has nothing to do with that holocaust and has a far wider reach than the mere destruction of a city. In her brief foreword ‘To all Noble and Worthy Ladies’, Cavendish declares that, ‘The First Part is Romancical; the Second, Philosophical; and the Third is meerly Fancy; or (as I may call it) Fantastical.’ She goes on to tell the following story.

A young woman is forced aboard a boat by a merchant who has fallen in love with her. A terrible storm sends the vessel up towards the North Pole and everyone on board freezes to death, except for the heroine. The boat sails onwards to a place where there is another pole close to the North Pole. This proves to be a portal to a separate planet: the eponymous Blazing-World, so called because it is lit by many Blazing-Starrs (sic). The world is populated by anthropomorphic beings such as bear-men, ape-men, fly-men, lice-men, spider-man and jackdaw-men, among numerous others. Each class of being has a specific task: for example, the fish-men are natural philosophers; giants are architects; bird-men are astronomers; and ape-men are chemists. Collectively, they decide to offer the new arrival as a wife to their emperor. He, taking her for some sort of goddess, proposes to worship her, an offer she declines. They marry, and the emperor ‘gave her an absolute power to rule and govern all that World as she pleased. But her subjects, who could hardly be perswaded to believe her mortal, tender’d her all the Veneration and Worship due to a Deity.’

The new empress of Blazing-World embarks on a series of scientific and philosophical debates with the various species, who show off their respective knowledge and skills (the ape-men, for instance, unveil a method, including an egg-and-milk-only diet, that can give even an ‘old decayed man’ the body of a 20-year-old – neatly prefiguring the sort of quack remedies that make up the content of so much spam today). Many of these encounters end with the author demonstrating that nature is superior to the scientific instruments created by humans. That is not to say that the empress is in any way a Luddite, for she engages in speculations on natural philosophy and encourages scientific research.

It is at this point that Cavendish herself enters the fray as a soul or a spirit summoned up from the empress’s home planet. Just in case the reader should be under any illusion about the identity of this spirit, she names her as the Duchess of Newcastle, someone who ‘is not one of the most learned, eloquent, witty and ingenious, yet she is a plain and rational Writer’. The empress chooses her as her personal scribe and the two form a close platonic bond. This relationship is complicated somewhat when the empress forms a deep intellectual bond with the Duke of Newcastle. The duchess, briefly jealous, gets over it (thus assuring readers that they are engaging with a work of fiction).

The scene then moves to Welbeck Abbey, the duke and duchess’s home in Sherwood Forest. A trial is held in the ducal seat in which the abstract notion of Fortune is set against Honesty and Prudence. Towards the end, Fortune storms off before Truth can deliver a verdict.

Trouble brews, for back in the world from which she had come, war breaks out. Most of the world’s nations have formed an alliance and are attacking Esfi, the kingdom where the empress was born. She forms a navy/air force composed of fish-men, who can tow submarines using golden chains, and bird-men, who can fly up from the submarines to bomb the enemy with fire stones. Thus armed she returns to her own planet through a portal to fight against Esfi’s enemies. As a result of her intervention, the king of Esfi is crowned ruler of the planet. The empress, her work done, returns to the Blazing-World to live a life of order and peace. The novel ends with the spirit of the duchess returning to her body back in Nottinghamshire where she regales her husband the duke with tales of the empress and her world.

It’s quite clear that in The Blazing-World, Margaret Cavendish is imagining a world as she would like it, a world in which she is in control. Of course, such a state of affairs was simply not possible in the patriarchal society in which the author found herself, even though she had a certain amount of status by virtue of being a duchess. ‘By this Poetical Description,’ she told her readers, ‘…my ambition is not onely (sic) to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole World.’ If she lacked power in the real world, she could at least take full control over the one she had imagined, ‘That though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavour to be, Margaret the First.’

Her work might therefore also be considered the first feminist novel (albeit it’s a man who eventually gets to rule the whole of the empress’s home planet), beating Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to the punch by nearly two centuries.

The two addenda Cavendish wrote – True Relation and The Blazing-World – helped open up whole new vistas in literature. In the first, she established the notion that a woman might write her life story, even if she didn’t find herself on the path to sainthood. In the second, she introduced many of the themes that form the bedrock of science fiction today, including the concept of portals into other worlds.

Never before or since have two literary B-sides made such an impact on the written word.