They lived in slightly embarrassed circumstances in Paris and Antwerp, before the coronation of Charles II brought them back to England. With the civil war raging, she joined the court of Queen Henrietta Maria and followed her into exile in France, where she met and married the much older William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle. Margaret’s own words are threaded through the text, with a vividly charged effect similar to Ruth Scurr’s exhilarating 2015 biography of her contemporary John Aubrey, constructed as a diary from his own words. She splits the novel in two, giving us Margaret’s inner thoughts on her coming of age, marriage and first writings, then taking a third-person perspective for her more public life after the Restoration. It is through a small miracle of imaginative sympathy and judicious sampling that Danielle Dutton, founder of the American feminist small press Dorothy, has compressed the essence of the capacious and contradictory duchess into 160 pages. “The crazy Duchess,” Woolf concluded, “became a bogey to frighten clever girls with” – effort, ambition and talent twisted out of shape by isolation and disappointment. For Virginia Woolf, she was the victim of a system that wouldn’t educate or guide her, with a “wild, generous, untutored intelligence poured itself out, higgledy-piggledy, in torrents”, as she “frittered her time away scribbling nonsense and plunging ever deeper into obscurity and folly”. Now she is a fascinating footnote, her 21 volumes little read. Women artists in centuries to come would get used to similar reactions.
Samuel Pepys dismissed her as “a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman” it was widely assumed that her books were written by her husband. Crowds ran after her carriage, calling her “Mad Madge”, marvelling at her extravagant dress sense (in an early work, she nicely describes clothes as “the Poetry of Women”). She was also unashamedly, publicly ambitious, in a way still discouraged in women today: well aware that her sex barred her from public and intellectual life, she nonetheless insisted that “though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First”.Īnd she was: the first woman to be invited to a meeting of the Royal Society (and the last, for 200 years), in Restoration London she got the fame she wanted – but as celebrity, rather than thinker. Born into an aristocratic family in 1623, in an era when women’s writing was vanishingly rare and usually anonymous, she put her name to poetry, plays and philosophy, scientific observations and fantastical romances.
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