Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (; 1623 – 16 December 1673) was an English natural philosopher, poet, fiction writer, and playwright. She was a prolific writer, publishing over a dozen original texts under her name at a time when women were largely excluded from publishing.
Although many would credit author Mary Shelley as the inventor of science fiction, Margaret Cavendish can also be counted as an essential pioneer. Her book The Blazing World is one of the first to fall into the science fiction genre. As a well-connected natural philosopher, Cavendish engaged with some of the most influential minds of her time, including René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and Henry More.
Background Born Margaret Lucas to Sir Thomas Lucas (1573–1625) and Elizabeth Leighton (died 1647), she was the youngest child of the family. She had four sisters and three brothers, the royalists Sir John Lucas, Sir Thomas Lucas and Sir Charles Lucas, who owned the manor of St John's Abbey, Colchester.N. Goose and J. Cooper (1998), "Tudor and Stuart Colchester," Victoria County History of Essex () As a teenager, she became an attendant on Queen Henrietta Maria and travelled with her into exile in France, living for a time at the court of the young King Louis XIV. She became the second wife of William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1645.
Her husband, the marquess William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle, was a Royalist commander in Northern England during the First English Civil War and in 1644 went into voluntary exile in France. Margaret accompanied him and remained abroad until the Stuart Restoration in 1660.David Cunning, "Margaret Lucas Cavendish," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2015 ed.), Edward N. Zalta, ed., URL=<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/margaret-cavendish/>.
Writings Cavendish, as a poet, philosopher, writer of prose romances, essayist, and playwright, published under her name at a time when most women writers remained anonymous. Her topics included gender, power, manners, scientific method, and philosophy. Her utopian romance The Blazing World is one of the earliest examples of science fiction.Lee Cullen Khanna, "The Subject of Utopia: Margaret Cavendish and Her Blazing-World", Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: World of Difference. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1994, pp. 15–34. She was unusual in her time for publishing extensively in natural philosophy and early modern science, producing over a dozen original works; with her revised works the total came to 21.O'Neill. She often would have her portrait engraved on the covers of her works so that people would know that she was solely responsible for the creation of whatever she wrote and then published in some way or another.
Cavendish has been championed and criticised as a unique, ground-breaking woman writer. She rejected the Aristotelianism and mechanical philosophy of the 17th century, preferring a vitalist model. In May 1667, she became the first woman to attend a meeting at the Royal Society of London, criticising and engaging with members and philosophers such as Robert Boyle.Nadine Akkerman and Marguérite Corporaal, "Mad science beyond flattery. The correspondence of Margaret Cavendish and Constantijn Huygens", Early Modern Literary Studies 14 May 2004, 2.1–21.
Cavendish's publications brought her fame and helped to disprove the contemporary belief that women were inherently inferior to men. Cavendish used them to advocate women's education: women were capable of learning and benefiting from education, and she insisted her own works would have been better still if, like her brothers, she had been able to attend school.
Views on animals Animals and the relationship between humans and other creatures recur in Cavendish's poetry and natural philosophy. She rejected René Descartes's account of non-human animals as mindless automata. In her natural philosophy, all parts of nature were composed partly of self-moving matter and therefore possessed some form of perception and knowledge. Cavendish consequently attributed knowledge not only to humans and other animals, but also to plants and minerals. She maintained that different creatures possessed different kinds of knowledge, asking, for example, whether fish might know more about water, birds about the air, and worms about the earth than humans did. Although she regarded humans as possessing a wider range of knowledge because of their bodily form, experience and use of language, she did not regard reason or perception as exclusively human capacities.
Cavendish addressed human treatment of animals most directly in Poems and Fancies (1653). "The Hunting of the Hare" and "The Hunting of the Stag" describe hunts from the perspective of the pursued animals, including their fear and suffering. In the former, she gives the hare the name "Wat" and describes the hunters' celebration of his death before accusing humans of believing that other creatures were made for them to "Tyrannize upon". Mihoko Suzuki interprets the poems as presenting hunted animals as individual subjects and exposing hunting as gratuitous violence. She argues that Cavendish's use of the language of tyranny gives her criticism of human domination over animals a political dimension. Cavendish also wrote elsewhere of animals as possessing their own forms of knowledge, and in "A Morall Discourse betwixt Man, and Beast" compared human abilities with those of other species while criticising the power humans exercised "To kill, to spoile, or else alive to take".
Cavendish also questioned the killing of animals for food. In Poems and Fancies, she criticised the assumption that God had given animals life and sensation merely for humans to eat, while in Grounds of Natural Philosophy she imagined animals and humans subsisting on fruits, herbs, milk and eggs rather than destroying an entire living creature. Roger Maioli describes these passages as recurring defences of vegetarianism and connects them to Cavendish's rejection of human centrality and her account of non-human cognition. Deborah Boyle offers a narrower interpretation, noting that Cavendish herself ate meat and arguing that she did not regard eating animals as inherently wrong. According to Boyle, her objections concerned excessive, wasteful or prideful uses of animals rather than their use for food itself.
Scholars have differed over how far these writings constitute an objection to the human use of animals. Boyle argues that Cavendish accepted that animals could legitimately be used by humans and objected instead to uses that were wasteful, excessively violent or motivated by human pride. Cavendish was not a vegetarian and referred in her autobiography to eating chicken. Although some of her works criticise killing large numbers of animals for feasts and portray birds objecting to being killed and eaten, Boyle argues that Cavendish did not regard eating animals as inherently wrong. Boyle similarly interprets the hunting poems as objections to the spectacle, waste and pride associated with hunting rather than to all killing of animals.
Cavendish has also been described as an early opponent of animal experimentation, partly because she wrote that she allowed butterflies to emerge naturally from their cocoons rather than opening them prematurely and risking their deaths. Boyle disputes interpreting this as a general opposition to animal experimentation. Cavendish discussed contemporary experiments involving the transfusion of blood between animals and humans without objecting to the use or killing of animals involved. Boyle argues that Cavendish's concern in the example of the butterflies was interference with the regular course of nature rather than animal experimentation itself, and concludes that she should not be characterised as a proto-animal-welfarist.
Early years Childhood
Cavendish's father, Thomas Lucas, was exiled after a duel that led to the death of "one Mr. Brooks", but pardoned by King James. He returned to England in 1603. As the youngest of eight, Cavendish recorded spending a lot of time with her siblings. She had no formal education but had access to libraries and tutors, although she hinted that the children paid little heed to tutors, who were "rather for formality than benefit". Cavendish began putting ideas down on paper at an early age, although it was poorly accepted for women to display such intelligence at the time and she kept her efforts in the privacy of her home. The family had significant means and Cavendish stated that her widowed mother chose to keep her family in a condition "not much lower" than when her father was alive; the children had access to "honest pleasures and harmless delights". Her mother had little to no male help.
Lady-in-waiting When Queen Henrietta Maria was in Oxford, Cavendish never gained permission from her mother to become a lady-in-waiting. She accompanied the Queen into exile in France, away from her family for the first time. She notes that while she was confident in her siblings' company, she became bashful amongst strangers. She was fearful she might speak or act inappropriately without her siblings' guidance, and with this, she carried anxiety about being well-received and well-liked. Due to this, she spoke only when necessary and so came to be regarded as a fool, which Cavendish stated that she preferred to being seen as wanton or rude. Regretting that she had left home to be a lady-in-waiting, Cavendish informed her mother that she wanted to leave the court, but her mother persuaded her not to disgrace herself by leaving and provided her with funds that Cavendish noted quite exceeded the normal means of a courtier. She remained a lady-in-waiting for two more years before marrying William Cavendish in 1645, then still Marquess of Newcastle.
Marriage to the Marquess Cavendish noted that her husband liked her bashfulness; he was the only man she was ever in love with, not for his title, wealth, or power, but for merit, justice, gratitude, duty, and fidelity. She saw these as attributes that held people together even in misfortune, and in their case helped them to endure suffering for their political allegiance. Cavendish had no children, despite efforts by her physician to help her conceive. Her husband had five surviving children from a previous marriage, two of whom, Jane and Elizabeth, wrote a comic play, The Concealed Fancies.
Cavendish later wrote a biography of her husband: The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendish. In her dedication, Cavendish recalls a time when rumours surrounded the authorship of her works: that her husband wrote them. Cavendish notes that her husband defended her from these but admits to a creative relationship, even as her writing tutor, for writing "fashions an image of a husband and wife who rely on each other in the public realm of print."
Personal life
Health Cavendish stated in A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life that her bashful nature, which she described as "melancholia", made her "repent my going from home to see the World abroad." It manifested itself in reluctance to discuss her work in public, but this she satirised in her writing. Cavendish defined and sought self-cures for the physical manifestations of her melancholia, which included "chill paleness", inability to speak, and erratic gestures.
Religious beliefs Cavendish's views on God and religion remained ambiguous. Her writings show her as a Christian, but she did not often address the matter. In her Physical Opinions, she explicitly stated her belief in the existence of God – "Pray account me not an Atheist, but believe as I do in God Almighty," – but sought to split philosophy from theology and so avoid debating God's actions in many of her philosophical works.