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It’s hard to overstate how daring it was for Margaret Cavendish to even contemplate publishing her writing in mid-seventeenth-century England. Gagged by their poor education and mandatory silence, very few women had ever done so before 1640, and the handful who had were conscious of having overstepped their bounds into dangerously wanton territory and so tended to stick to ‘chaste’ and therefore ‘suitable’ feminine subjects: religious meditations and divine visions, poetry on love, friendship or God, domestic advice, recipes or cures. In the five years between 1616 and 1620, just eight new titles were published by women – 0.5 per cent of the 2,240 total.

But with the destabilising force of the Civil War came an undermining of all forms of established authority, and after 1640, during the war and Interregnum in particular, a mini-revolution took hold as women seized the opportunity created by the upheaval to publish books in increasing numbers. Between 1646 and 1650, new titles by women shot up to 69. And during the 1650s, almost five times as many books by women were printed than in the 1630s.[26] Aided by a brief lapse in the censorship laws,[27] this productivity boom hit both male and female writers, but women were the biggest gainers.

The rules of the game were slowly changing, but for women publishing remained a risky business. Even those who stuck to ‘feminine’ topics could still be attacked for disseminating their ideas. When Eleanor Davies published her prophetical visions in 1625, her husband was so enraged that he burnt her manuscript. And Elizabeth Avery, whose Scripture-prophecies Opened appeared in 1647, was publicly attacked for it by her own brother, who wrote in 1650, ‘your printing of a book, beyond the custom of your sex, doth rankly smell’.[28] Lady Mary Wroth, meanwhile, encountered such vitriolic accusations of betraying her sex on the publication of her romance Urania in 1621 (notably from Sir Edward Denny, who in an acrid satirical verse labelled her a ‘Hermaphrodite in show, in deed a monster’) that she was forced to deny she had ever intended to publish it at all and attempted to withdraw all copies.[29] These ancestral trolls, who abused or ridiculed any woman who dared to speak out, intimidated their quarry, certainly, but didn’t always succeed in silencing them. Women writers set about exploiting every loophole they could think of: some pre-empted attack with apologetic prefaces, others specifically addressed women or continued to confine themselves to modest, virtuous, ‘feminine’ subjects, while many chose to write anonymously or under a pseudonym.

When Margaret Cavendish strode into this daunting arena in 1653, however, with her first book, Poems and Fancies, she would take very few of these mitigating measures. Not only would she publish, she would do so under her own name and cover subjects that were considered exclusively male. This was a book whose dainty title belied its extraordinary contents. In lieu of the formal education she couldn’t have, Margaret had spent her married life absorbing like a sponge every topic under discussion in her scholarly household – philosophy, science, literature, politics – and it had all filtered into her work. Her poems were not about love or friendship or God: they described fairies that lived at the centre of the Earth; a microscopic world contained in an earring; the terror of hunted animals; the futility of war; the elements; the universe; light, sound, matter and motion; and, most extraordinary of all, the scientific theory of atomism – a school of thought, derived from the Ancient Greek philosophers Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius, which argued that particles of different sizes, shapes and properties comprised and governed the world. Her fancies were no less surprising: she wrote allegorical dialogues between Wit and Beauty, Earth and Darkness, Melancholy and Mirth; moral discourses on pride, humility, wealth and poverty; and fantastical prose that imagined a Royalist parliament as a diseased human body in need of a cure. It was a wildly abundant compendium of every style and subject that critiqued human nature and expounded dangerously materialist and atheistic views. Coming from a woman, this was not normal.[30]

Such an ambitious work would inevitably provoke outrage and ridicule, so Margaret also included copious prefaces, epistles and addresses in her book, designed to defend her decision to publish – the only placatory tactic she would employ. In her poem ‘The Poetresses Hasty Resolution’, she describes how her initial qualms almost prevented her from publishing at all. Reason urged her to ‘do the world a good turn, / And all you write cast in the fire and burn’,[31] but ambition made her impulsive. With a gambler’s recklessness she ‘resolved to set it at all hazards’, for she had little to lose and immortality to win: ‘If fortune be my friend, then fame will be my gain, which may build me a pyramid, a praise to my memory.’[32]

She expected censure, particularly from men, who would doubtless ‘cast a smile of scorne upon my book, because they think thereby, women encroach too much upon their prerogatives; for they hold books as their crown … by which they rule’.[33] The most obvious accusations, however – that she ought to be looking after her children and household instead of indulging her whims in writing – she could easily bat away, for she had no children and her husband’s estate had been confiscated. As for any claims that she was just another aristocratic dilettante doodling away in her idle hours, Margaret would show just how seriously she took her work: she was as fond of her book, she wrote, ‘as if it were my child’, and, like a proud mother, was ‘striving to show her to the world, in hopes some may like her’. The analogy was clever; it implied not only that her mind had achieved a lasting act of creation that her body could not, but that, far from being ‘wanton’ or ‘rude’, it was in fact ‘harmless, modest and honest’ for a woman to publish her work – as natural and virtuous as being a mother.[34]

Margaret faced one challenge even greater than public disapproval, though. She was a factory of complex, unusual ideas, yet her rudimentary home-tuition had left her without the tools to perfectly express them. In this she was nothing unusual; the state of women’s education in the seventeenth century was even poorer than it had been in the last, especially for upper-class women.[35] King James I had disapproved of intellectual women and encouraged a culture of ridiculing them at court, and the attitude had stuck. Those upstart women who did acquire learning were viewed with suspicion, as the scholar Bathsua Makin knew well: ‘A learned woman is thought to be a comet,’ she wrote in An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), ‘that bodes mischief, whenever it appears.’ The scholar Dr George Hickes noted the trend in 1684: ‘It is shameful, but ordinary,’ he said, ‘to see gentlewomen, who have both wit and politeness, not able yet to pronounce well what they read … They are still more grossly deficient in orthography, or in spelling right, and in the manner of forming or connecting letters.’[36] Margaret was a prime example. Her handwriting was near-illegible, her spelling wayward, her rhymes and metre flawed, her grammar idiosyncratic and her punctuation conspicuous by its absence. She was acutely aware of it – her ‘brain being quicker in creating than the hand in writing’[37] – but was often too caught up in a frenzy of creativity to be much of an editor. Her secretaries and typesetters had to pick up this slack, resulting in skewed interpretations of her meaning and rounds of later corrections.

Bowing to common opinion, Margaret concluded that it was simply ‘against nature for a woman to spell right’,[38] arguing that originality and wit were more valuable than the technicalities of form. Yes, her writing could be indulgent and baggy, her arguments incomplete and foggy, but to her a free and artless style was best: ‘Give me a style that nature frames, not art, / For art doth seem to take the pedant’s part.’[39] It’s a convenient argument when the art is largely missing, but it ignores the real problem: her lack of education. It’s been suggested that she might even have been dyslexic.[40] But having internalised the prevailing assumption that women were undeserving of education, blaming her own natural incompetence was the only defence she had.

For those looking for a straightforward feminist heroine in Margaret Cavendish, this is a problem. Keen to present herself as a wonder of the age, as something ‘other’ than the average woman, she voices the troubling suggestion that women are not naturally suited for intellectual pursuits more than once in Poems and Fancies: ‘True it is,’ she writes in one epistle, ‘spinning with the fingers is more proper to our sex, than studying or writing poetry.’[41] And in her address ‘To all writing ladies’, despite urging them to push beyond their domestic sphere into the world of politics, religion, philosophy and poetry, she adds that ‘though we be inferior to men, let us shew our selves a degree above beasts’.[42]

At this early stage in her career, when her ideas are in their infancy, Margaret is infuriatingly inconsistent on women’s intellectual worth. With her own busy, capacious, ambitious mind fighting the remnants of patriarchal indoctrination, she flip-flops from apologist to agitator and back again. Elsewhere in the same book, she delivers a defiant ‘up yours’ to the snide world outside that’s just itching to condemn her:

Tis true, the world may wonder at my confidence, how I dare put out a book, especially in these censorious times; but why should I be ashamed, or afraid, where no evil is, and not please my self in the satisfaction of innocent desires? For a smile of neglect cannot dishearten me, no more can a frown of dislike affright me … my mind’s too big, and I had rather venture an indiscretion, than lose the hopes of a fame. [43]

This is the Margaret Cavendish that feminists adore, emerging from her chrysalis: singular, ambitious, confident of her intelligence and proudly dismissive of what others think. Over time, her ideas on women, like her ideas on natural philosophy, would develop into a much more coherent, formidable statement, but for now, she was primarily on the defensive, knowing damn well that her actions, though harmless, would be seen as provocative. With Sir Edward Denny’s famous hectoring verse to Lady Mary Wroth still ringing in Margaret’s ears three decades after it was written, she imagined men telling her, too, to go back to her sewing:

Work Lady, work, let writing books alone,

For surely wiser women nere wrote one. [44]

But Margaret would do no such thing, ‘For all I desire, is Fame.’ And fame she would get. Throughout her writing career, she would produce a staggering 23 books – accounting for over half of the total number of books (just 42) published by women between 1600 and 1640.[45] With her unabashed ambitions, and with few to rival her intrepid subject matter or prolific output,[46] Margaret would stand almost entirely alone in the century as a woman writer who could not be ignored.