Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Life And The Literary Reputation Of Margaret Cavendish, James Fitzmaurice

Quidditas

It might be said of the œuvre of Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) and in loose, jocular paraphrase of Sigmund Freud that biography has been destiny. Certainly a great many people who study British literature today pay as much attention to the various, often brief, assessments of the life of the woman as to what she wrote. For those scholars who concentrate on canonical male writers of the seventeenth century, she remains as she has for the last fifty years or so—a colorful eccentric who goes by the nickname “Mad Madge.” She is, thus, sufficiently represented by the few poems, the snippet …