Woman unbound
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and her extravagant genre-bending fantasy, “The Blazing World.” Not wanting to be defined as a woman, she wrote what she wanted, unabashedly.
This essay is part of a series called “Shut Out, Not Shut Up” on women through the ages who’ve written despite being dismissed because of their sex. They persisted.

I adore the worlds that spring from Susanna Clarke’s mind.1 In each book, Clarke spins up fully-realized alternative realities. Despite their adjacency to ours, her conjured worlds follow their own novel natural laws. If J. K. Rowling impressed you as a child (or as an adult reading to a child), it’s possible you’ll fall under Clarke’s spell as you read her work. Four years on, I still carry Piranesi—his long hair adorned with shells and bits of found beauty—with me. In the House of Piranesi I discovered a perfectly created world: clouds and constellations above, seas below. The novel exists in an infinite universe of possibility, and as a reader I feel fortunate to have experienced it.
This week I read a novel that embarked on that same flight of authorial fancy: The Blazing World. The character who journeys there from the known world navigates through a utopia. This book could be science fiction. It could be fantasy. It could be social or political commentary. Its author wanted to make something that couldn’t be easily contained, and succeeded.
This novel was written almost 400 years ago by an author who, shockingly for the times, claimed her name on the title page when she published it. Meet Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and her utopian fantasy, The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World.
Options for women writers in the 17th century
Female published authors were few in the 1600’s, and when they wrote, they often did so in verse—poetry, dramatic poetry, or plays. They tended toward religious and moral themes. Women also wrote political essays and books, as well as philosophical treatises. Lacking a literary canon for their sex, women followed the examples of men, even when eviscerating patriarchy and enraging the male gatekeepers.
Fantasy as we know it wasn’t an established literary genre at the time (although fantastic themes and devices were common: magic, witchcraft, fairies), and Newcastle2 was not inclined to be restrained by convention in any case.
“Margaret Cavendish was devoted to personal excess, and the number of substantial, elaborately produced books she wrote and published under her own name and at considerable expense, in a career spanning twenty years, constituted her most radical and deliberate infringement of contemporary proprieties. But Cavendish’s writing is not only copious and unusually secular, it is also overtly polemical and formally experimental. […] An interrogation of systems of knowledge and modes of description, as well as the fluid relations between gender and genre, informs all of Cavendish’s writing, and marks it as generically self-conscious and ambitious.”
-Kate Lilley, “Introduction” to The Blazing World and Other Writings, Penguin, 2004
Newcastle considered her novel The Blazing World a hybrid of “romancical” (her term), philosophical, and fantastical models, creating a new genre for literary writing. She was not only proud of her creation: she flaunted it.

When Virginia Woolf calls you a cucumber
If you read about Newcastle, you’ll likely find this quotation from Virginia Woolf:
“What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind! as if some cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.”
-Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
That quotation needs some context. In the prior paragraph, Woolf wrote:
“Margaret too might have been a poet; in our day all that activity would have turned a wheel of some sort. As it was, what could bind, tame or civilize for human use that wild, generous, untutored intelligence? It poured itself out, higgledly-piggeldy, in torrents of rhyme and prose, poetry and philosophy which stand congealed in quartos and folios that nobody ever reads. She should have had a microscope put in her hand. She should have been taught to look at the stars and reason scientifically. Her wits were turned with solitude and freedom. No one checked her. No one taught her. The professors fawned on her. At Court they jeered at her.”
From this, the popular conclusion is that Woolf damns Newcastle as a writer. I think there’s more to it than that.
Consider the timing: Newcastle wrote The Blazing World in 1666 and she died in 1674. The first microscope was invented by two opticians in 1590 and Robert Hooke wrote a monograph on it in 1667. In 1675 (after Newcastle’s death), Anton van Leeuwenhoek used a simple microscope to study small insects and became the first to observe a bacterium. Newcastle was clearly intrigued by this invention and seems to have personal experience using a microscope. She dedicated a section in The Blazing World to the wonder of microscopes that can ‘make a louse look like an elephant.’ She has her protagonist study a charcoal line to observe the numerous ‘pores’ in the seemingly opaque mark. She examines under the microscope a nettle, an insect’s eyes, a flea, a louse. It’s hard to see the merit in scolding Newcastle for not having a microscope in hand, if that’s what Woolf intends.
Although untutored, Newcastle did attempt to apply logic and reason to her scientific inquiries. For those of us whose public school educations (hundreds of years later) benefited from the science Newcastle admittedly struggles to grasp, her inquiries—into the relation of the sun to the moon, the reason for the stars in the sky, what causes the wind, how ice is made, what thunder and lightning are—may seem like a mind flailing to understand the mysteries of the observed world. But in fact, the section of The Blazing World in which its Empress seeks to learn the physics of this science-fiction world demonstrates an orderly mind that searches for facts and weighs the relative strength of competing theories.
Woolf tips her hand in this sentence: “Her wits were turned with solitude and freedom.” It may help to remember that these words appear in a treatise advocating for women writers to have ‘a room of one’s own and five hundred a year”: i.e., solitude and freedom. Newcastle was all over the place (‘higgledy-piggeldy’). She had an uncontrolled appetite for fame and infamy, for breaking boundaries, for refusing to be boxed in (that untidy cucumber). She’s accused of writing like a man: which is to say, for being unapologetic about her interests and appetites. She was audacious and vain. She was daring. That’s some of what’s possible when you have castles to retire to and no obligations beyond your own desires.
I imagine Woolf with a wry smile as she penned this section on Newcastle. The prior year, Woolf published Orlando: A Biography, the fantastic tale of a man born in Elizabethan England whose sex changes at age 30 and who lives for 300 years. Woolf would have no quarrel with the ‘hermaphroditic’ Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle.3
The Blazing World
Margaret Newcastle’s novel imagines a young, beautiful woman who’s stolen by a merchant and taken away from her home by packet ship. The ship travels to the North Pole, where the merchant and his crew make an amazing and perilous discovery: at each of the earth’s poles exists a passageway into a contiguous other world.
Only the young woman survives the passage. She marvels that this world has its own sun and moon. This ‘blazing world’ is both familiar and strange. Bear-like creatures come to her aid: fearing them at first, she soon comes to understand that they intend to bring her to the Emperor of this world. On their journey, she meets specialized types of men. After the bear-men and the fox-men whom she first encounters are these:
They came into an island where there were men which had heads, beaks, and feathers, like wild-geese, only they went in an upright shape, like the bear-men and fox-men; their rumps they carried between their legs, their wings were of the same length of their bodies, and their tails of an indifferent size, trailing after them like a lady’s garment; [….]
This new world, unlike the one she’d left, is organized harmoniously into a single realm in which every species contributes their unique talents for the good of the empire. She discovers people who bear different complexions: azure, deep purple, grass-green, scarlet, orange. There are worm-men and fish-men and bird-men—the list of types of men is so extensive that it’s best to think of every species of animal in the world we know, but all of them able to communicate using a common language shared with humans. There is no Babel here: a single language enables the world to share its knowledge across species.
The Emperor, delighted with the beautiful visitor and she with him, marries her and makes her the Empress of the world. Newly empowered with every resource imaginable, the Empress sets out to understand how this world works. She organizes convocations of experts (e.g., worm-men) to advise her with facts and theories to answer her questions. She’s intensely curious, and her inquiries allow Newcastle to flesh out this blazing world.
In this world, it’s also possible for souls to be brought from one person to another, and so it happens that the soul of the Duchess of Newcastle is brought from the Empress’ birth world to conjoin with the Empress in the blazing world. The Empress learns that war threatens to destroy the land of her birth, and she plots a way to save her old world using the unique resources and technologies4 available to her. She’s victorious, and when she returns to the blazing world, she leaves behind an earth that’s ruled by one ruler, the king of her birth nation.
In her Epilogue to the book, Newcastle writes:
By this poetical description, you may perceive, that my ambition is not only to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole world; and that the worlds I have made […] are framed and composed of the most pure, that is, the rational parts of matter, which are the parts of my mind; [….] I have made my Blazing World, a peaceable world, allowing it but one religion, one language, and one government; yet could I make another world, as full of factions, divisions, and wars, as this is of peace and tranquility [….] But I esteeming peace before war, wit before policy, honesty before beauty; instead of the figures of Alexander, Caesar, Hector, Achilles, Nestor, Ulysses, Helen, etc. chose rather the figure of honest Margaret Newcastle, which now I would not change for all this terrestrial world.”
She goes on to encourage others to “create worlds of their own, and govern themselves as they please.” Her life experiences were fractious and torn by war. In her imagination, she could create the order and peacefulness not possible in a land riven by civil war and capped with the Restoration of the king.
Who is Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle?
Born in 1623, Margaret was the youngest child of Sir Thomas Lucas and his wife, Elizabeth. As a teenager, Margaret became an attendant to the English Queen and travelled with the royal party during their exile in France. For a time, Margaret served in the court of France’s Sun King, King Louis XIV.
While living abroad, Margaret met William Cavendish, the Duke of Newcastle, who was also in exile during the Civil Wars, since he was a royalist. Margaret and William married in Paris and moved to Antwerp at the beginning of 2nd Civil War. When the Commonwealth was established, William found himself formally banished and his estates confiscated. Two years later, Margaret accompanied her brother-in-law to petition for the return of Newcastle’s assets; this petition was denied. Margaret returned to Antwerp in March 1653 and immediately began to publish her literary work.
When the Newcastles were able to return to England after the Restoration, Margaret’s infamous reputation as a writer preceded her. The Newcastles retired to their Welbeck estate in Nottinghamshire, since it was the least damaged of their properties. Margaret continued to write with a vengeance, producing “another seven books of orations, letters, scientific speculation, utopian fiction, biography, poetry and closet drama5.” She died suddenly in December 1673, aged 50. Only her husband survived her; they had no children.
Margaret Newcastle’s legacy
In 1929, Virginia Woolf felt confident to say that Newcastle’s body of work rested “congealed in quartos and folios that nobody ever reads.” Newcastle intentionally broke with convention, and did it with pleasure. Eccentrics often find few followers.
“There is pathos, and some would say justice, in the historical diminution of so extravagant a textual self-witnessing [….] Cavendish self-consciously produced herself as a fantastic and singular woman, and that labor of self-representation successfully dominated seventeenth century and later accounts of both her life and writing. Pepys’s often-quoted remark, ‘The whole story of this Lady is a romance, and all she doth is romantic’, was a shrewd reading of a woman who represented herself as figuratively hermaphrodite. Her idiosyncratic dress combined masculine and feminine elements in a parodic masquerade of gender, while her rare and highly theatrical public appearances never failed to draw an audience. But her singularity has also, and perhaps more commonly, been interpreted as monstrous, and her texts similarly characterized as deformed in various ways: chaotic, old-fashioned, uneven, contradictory and insane.”
-Kate Lillet
The cover art on my Penguin copy of The Blazing World is from the painting shown above. Vanity is depicted as a winged ‘Genius’ holding an ivory cameo and pointing to a globe of the world. Surrounding the figure are an ornate golden clock, coins, miniature portratits, a string of pearls, playing cards, armor, a gun, skulls, manuscripts, an extinguished candle, the stilled sands of time.
The figure appears androgynous, and the elements around it evoke war, science, time, happiness, family, wealth, the arts, gaming. This Genius could be male; it could be female. While the moral of vanity is unambiguous, its representation here is less so. Its depiction suggests more a memento mori: a reminder that our every pursuit is destined to be lost to time.
The painting aptly recalls the world-creating genius of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Although long forgotten, and mocked when her works were resurrected, I see her imprint in the wild beauty of Clarke’s Piranesi. Newcastle was extravagant while Clarke can be spare, but they each render worlds of wonder never before known. To read their work is to pass into the imagination of another. It’s a thrilling journey.
Ellie’s Corner
The heat finally found us in the Canadian Maritimes, and Ellie prefers the cool floorboards to the rug under my chair or the bed on the other side of the room. She moves just enough to remind me that she’s here, in case I need a break to scratch an ear or … take a walk!!! She’s not wrong.
Thanks for reading,
Author of “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,” “The Ladies of Grace Adieu,” and the monumental yet slim volume, “Piranesi.”
She’s commonly referred to as ‘Cavendish,’ her married name. However, she preferred to call attention to her status and liked to use the name Margaret Newcastle. I’m inclined to call people what they want to be called, so I’m referring to her as Newcastle. Quoted passages, however, refer to her as Cavendish, which I hope doesn’t prove too distracting.
Was Woolf using ‘cucumber’ as an eggplant emoji? I think the phallic reference fits Woolf’s critique, which is that Newcastle’s interests were more masculine than feminine. Which isn’t a criticism so much as an analysis.
Apart from soul-travelling, there is also a gold submarine the Empress devises and fire that’s fed by contact with water.
A ‘closet drama’ is a play that’s written to be read, not performed. Newcastle lacked the theatrical connections that would have enabled her to write for the stage (few women did then), so she wrote plays that she knew would exist only in imagination.
I loved Clarke’s Piranesi, and because of you, now I’m going to have have a go at The Blazing World as well!