#39 The Works of Margaret Cavendish
These items all came from the same donor, a remarkable writer, thinker, and philosopher from the seventeenth century, who also made sure her works were properly distributed.
1. This is a collection of books by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who lived from 1623 to 1673. She was born Margaret Lucas, and began writing at an early age. Later, she joined the household of Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria.
2. She was the Duke’s second wife. They married in 1645, while he was still the Marquess, and they were in exile on the Continent.
3. Following the Restoration, Margaret and William returned to England, although neither returned to their court positions.
4. During her life, Margaret published around 22 books, some of them in more than one edition.
5. One of her most famous works is The Blazing World, often considered one of the first science fiction novels.
6. Margaret was the first woman to be invited to a meeting of the Royal Society, and she wrote on science as well as philosophy, developing the first atomist theory in Britain. However, she was often also considered a ‘mad woman’, with Samuel Pepys describing her as “a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman.”
7. She wrote fiction, poetry, plays, philosophy, theology, science, and biography, as well as publishing collections of her letters.
8. Despite her prolific writing, Margaret’s work was much neglected after her death, and her work only began to achieve prominence again in the 20th century, when the feminist aspects of her work became of particular interest.
9. In order to ensure her legacy, Margaret arranged for copies of her works to be given to all the extant colleges in Oxford and Cambridge This was usually done through intermediaries such as the Provost of The Queen’s College, who would receive the copies and send them out to his peers.
10. In some of the copies, corrections were made by hand, then sprinkled with ‘pounce’, a powder commonly used on ink to dry it faster. The particular pounce used by Margaret’s assistant contains mica, leading the words to look like they were written with a glitter pen!
For more on Margaret Cavendish's Oxford and Cambridge donations, do read Liza Blake's articles:
Pounced Corrections in Oxford Copies of Cavendish’s Philosophical and Physical Opinions; or, Margaret Cavendish’s Glitter Pen in New College Notes 10 (2018)
And
Margaret Cavendish's University Years: Batch Bindings and Trade Bindings in Cambridge and Oxford. In The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America vol. 116:1 March 2022
