LITMIR.BIZ

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was produced by a female publisher[70] – but inevitably it was a romanticised portrait seen through an adoring lover’s eyes.

      As such, it still drew criticism. Samuel Pepys, always quick to belittle Margaret since she had disappointed him at the Royal Society earlier that year, began reading it the following spring but soon declared it a ‘ridiculous history’ that showed her to be ‘a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman, and [William] an ass to suffer [her] to write what she writes to him and of him’.[71] William’s crime in encouraging, rather than forbidding, his wife’s writing is ranked almost equal with Margaret’s insanity in writing it in the first place. The work was so overtly panegyric, likening the Duke’s deeds to those of Caesar, and at the same time so banal (who cared what he ate for dinner, how long he took to dress or how much money he had lost?) that, for Pepys, it was rendered an undignified and vulgar exercise that made both of them look absurd and Margaret – as usual – mad.

      ALL THE TOWN-TALK

      During the Cavendishes’ visit to London in the spring of 1667 – when Pepys chased Margaret all around town; when scores of children trailed in her wake; when she requested, and was granted, that historic visit to the Royal Society – one thing became quite clear: mad or not, the Duchess of Newcastle was now a celebrity. Restoration London was full of wonders, both thrilling and terrible. The backlash against Puritanism had ushered in a new era of licence, entertainment, flamboyance and festivity. The theatres had re-opened and women were walking their stages for the first time. Houses, shops, public buildings, churches and gaols had been reduced to charred skeletons, consumed by the most biblical conflagration the country had ever witnessed. And the Merry Monarch, Charles II, had presided over all, attended by his harem of mistresses. Yet still, this maimed, dazed and dazzled city was left open-mouthed with astonishment at the sight of Margaret Cavendish: the eccentrically dressed duchess who wrote fantastical books on mannish subjects and made ‘legs and bows’ instead of curtseys as if she were the heroine of one of her own romances.[72] The woman was a spectacle, and with that came the fame she had so long desired. But fame, she was learning, has its drawbacks.

      The invitation to the Royal Society had caused controversy not just because Margaret was a woman, but because Margaret was Margaret. The fledgling Society’s endeavours had arrogant, atheistic, revolutionary overtones, and consequently it had enemies. Margaret had even been one of them. She agreed with many of the Society’s ideas and values, but she had criticised two of its leading members, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, in print not long before, as well as its whole programme of experimental research. Protective of the Society’s reputation, many of its members had been against the admittance of a woman who attracted ridicule and criticism, and when she finally arrived, looking like ‘a cavalier, but that she had no beard’, and the ingenious remarks that this sea of men were waiting for failed to materialise, they congratulated themselves on being proved right.[73]

      Pepys’s fascination with Margaret curdled instantly, but John Evelyn, who had already started paying court to the Duke and Duchess at their house in Clerkenwell, was intrigued. After his first visit, he decided her oddities were a novel kind of amusement, proclaiming himself ‘much pleased with the extraordinary fanciful habit, garb and discourse of the Duchess’.[74] His wife, on the other hand, gave a damning verdict. Mary Evelyn conceded to a friend that Margaret had ‘a good shape, which she may truly boast of’, but had little else positive to say. Her dress was ‘fantastical’, her ‘curls and patches’ overdone, her mannerisms affected, excessive and insufferable – just like her work: ‘her gracious bows, seasonable nods, courteous stretching out of her hands, twinkling of her eyes, and various gestures of approbation, show what may be expected from her discourse, which is airy, empty, whimsical, and rambling as her books, aiming at science, difficulties, high notions, terminating commonly in nonsense, oaths, and obscenity’. Her ambition was nothing more than vanity, and what galled Mary most was that even wise, discerning men were taken in: ‘I found Doctor Charleton with her, complimenting her wit and learning in a high manner; which she took to be so much her due, that she swore if the schools did not banish Aristotle, and read Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, they did her wrong … Never did I see a woman so full of herself, so amazingly vain and ambitious.’[75]

      What Mary Evelyn had missed was that much of this behaviour was Margaret’s attempt at masking her own social awkwardness. Even in middle age, as a well-known author, she was gripped by shyness at society gatherings, causing her to overcompensate with overt displays of conviviality. Nerves would make her talkative, and in the wake of those accusations that her works were not her own, she chattered about her books ‘more … than otherwise I should have done’[76] and learned passages by heart to prove her authorship.

      The effect was quite the opposite of the one she was aiming for. A confident, ambitious woman translated as vulgar and arrogant, antagonising more conventional women like Mary Evelyn, who, like Dorothy Osborne, thought it improper and unchaste for a woman to write books at all, let alone books like Margaret’s. Though not uncultured herself, Mary toed the patriarchal line when it came to the ‘proper’ purpose of a woman’s life: they were ‘not born to read authors and censure the learned’, but to be of service to the sick, the poor, their husbands and children.[77] She couldn’t help drawing comparisons between Margaret and the ‘matchless’ Katherine Philips, whose respectable poems on Platonic love and friendship had been published without her consent, and who therefore fitted the modest mould of femininity to perfection: ‘What contrary miracles does this age produce,’ Mary exclaimed in her letters. ‘This lady and Mrs Philips! The one transported with the shadow of reason, the other possessed of the substance and insensible of her treasure.’

      So alarmed was Mary by this new breed of woman that she would quickly remove herself from Margaret’s presence for ‘fear of infection’, and hoped that ‘as she is an original, she may never have a copy’.[78] Perhaps she had heard about Margaret’s recent trip to the theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where William’s play The Humorous Lovers (thought by Pepys to be ‘the silly play of my Lady Newcastle’s’) was being performed,[79] for on that occasion she wore a special dress of her own design that exposed her breasts, ‘all laid out to view’, revealing ‘scarlet trimmed nipples’. Such an heroic, classical, barely-there costume might have been acceptable for a court masque or a portrait, but for a trip to the theatre this was a whimsy too far.[80] It was these kinds of theatrical displays that prompted Pepys to note in his diary that ‘All the town-talk is nowadays of her extravagancies’[81] and left Mary Evelyn almost dumbstruck. Like Pepys and Dorothy Osborne, she could only conclude that Margaret Cavendish belonged in the madhouse: ‘I was surprised to find so much extravagancy and vanity in any person not confined within four walls.’

      It’s not altogether surprising that some of Margaret’s fiercest critics were women. This other-worldly being, who was ‘not of mortal race, and, therefore, cannot be defined’, who could only be compared with queens and romance heroines, was flouting all the rules that other women felt obliged to live by. When Margaret was around, women like Mary Evelyn were pushed to the sidelines, expected ‘not to speak, but admire’[82] – and having always been taught to view other women as rivals rather than sisters, inevitably they sometimes resorted to jealousy, judgement, spite and even fear.

      However, regardless of whether they approved of her or not, the public had made a mythical creature out of the Duchess; they talked about her, wrote about her and were desperate to catch sight of her. Margaret had courted the attention, and enjoyed being a visual spectacle, but as a social misfit striving hard to impress a sceptical crowd, she was bound to disappoint occasionally. As she struggled through the hobnobbing and learned what a fickle friend celebrity could be, perhaps the lustre wore off a little, for come July 1667, the Cavendishes returned to the peace and solitude of Welbeck, where Margaret was always happiest.

      MARGARET THE FIRST

      Margaret got straight back to work on her return to Welbeck, and over the next few years she concentrated on revising more works to prove just how much she had matured as a philosopher and writer. Her new editions reflected her broadened reading and contained tightened, simplified and in some cases reversed versions of her earlier arguments, with clearer explanations,

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