Читать книгу Roaring Girls - Holly Kyte - Страница 27

After nearly 18 months in England, Margaret grew impatient to return to William in Antwerp. She had sent her first book to the printers and even dashed off another (Philosophical Fancies),[47] and Sir Charles’s estates had finally been released from sequestration, enabling him to buy back the family seats of Welbeck and Bolsover (though at a greatly inflated price) and stabilise the family’s finances. So on 16 February 1653, just two months before Poems and Fancies was due to publish, Margaret set off back to Antwerp, reluctantly leaving her brother-in-law behind as he had succumbed to a fever.

With the lovers rapturously reunited, and the publication of her first two books imminent, Margaret’s secret was out, and to her relief and gratitude she found in William a rare husband who entirely supported his wife’s new career. He understood her literary ambitions because he had them himself, though he had the grace to recognise that she was the better writer. He would encourage her, write prefaces and the odd line or verse for her, praise her (blindly, some said), and together they sent out her books to their illustrious friends and waited nervously for the responses.

Anticipation was high when Poems and Fancies was due to appear in April – though not necessarily for the right reasons. Dorothy Osborne wrote excitedly to her betrothed, Sir William Temple, ‘… first let me ask you if you have seen a book of poems newly come out, made by my Lady Newcastle?’ There was a concealed barb in her enquiry, however, as she clearly intended to despise it: ‘For God’s sake if you meet with it send it to me; they say tis ten times more extravagant than her dress. Sure, the poor woman is a little distracted, she could never be so ridiculous else as to venture at writing books, and in verse too.’[48] Margaret’s reputation as an eccentric had preceded her, and for many her decision to write only confirmed their prejudices.

Once they had actually opened the book, reader responses were mixed. The 2nd Earl of Westmorland, Mildmay Fane, was an avid fan, scrawling a poem in praise of Margaret’s talent inside his copy, while friends of the Cavendishes predictably gave it a glowing review. The highly cultured polymath and Dutch diplomat Constantijn Huygens wrote to a friend that it was ‘a wonderful book, whose extravagant atoms kept me from sleeping a great part of last night’. Others were less impressed. Once she’d got her hands on it, Dorothy Osborne felt entirely vindicated in her assumptions that Margaret must surely be mad, sniping to Sir William: ‘You need not send me my Lady Newcastle’s book at all, for I have seen it, and am satisfied that there are many soberer people in Bedlam. I’ll swear her friends are much to blame to let her go abroad.’[49] Margaret was not only compromising her womanly virtue by publishing a book; she was also guilty of an ‘extravagant’ kind of literature. Her ‘free and noble style’ that ‘runs wild about, it cares not where’[50] was scatterbrained, unrefined and hard to follow – it was all far too unconventional for Dorothy Osborne.

Another worrying response came from friend and courtier Sir Edward Hyde, who offered the ultimate back-handed compliment that a woman could surely not have written so clever, so learned, so masculine a book, with ‘so many terms of art, and such expressions proper to all sciences’.[51] The humble apologia, used so commonly by male writers and taken as intended – a rhetorical show of modesty aimed at endearing the writer to his audience – were in Margaret’s case being taken as an admission that she was so inept she must be passing off someone else’s work as her own. It was yet another accusation to add to the list of defences she was compiling for her next work, which was already underway.

On arriving back in Antwerp, Margaret had eagerly returned to a collection of essays she had started before her trip to England, but when she sifted through her papers, she was disheartened by what she found. It was obvious, even to her, that they were littered with errors and sagging under the weight of stunted arguments, half-baked ideas and distracting digressions. To revise them seemed too Herculean a task, so, true to form, in late 1654, she lazily published them anyway, as The World’s Olio – a concoction of observations on all manner of subjects, literary, political, social and philosophical, that made up the rich stew or ‘olio’ of the title – and, without correcting the proofs, sent it out into the world to be assessed, warts and all.

Hampered, still, by the misconception that she was not up to the task at hand, Margaret again used prefaces to excuse her faults and lay the blame on her gender: ‘It cannot be expected I should write so wisely or wittily as men,’ she insisted, ‘being of the effeminate sex, whose brains nature hath mix’d with the coldest and softest elements’.[52] She rejected the ‘great complaints’ from women, which were evidently becoming louder, that men had ‘usurped a supremacy’ over them since Creation. In fact, she argued the opposite, that ‘Men have great reason not to let us in to their governments, for there is great difference betwixt the masculine brain and the feminine’. While men had the strength of an oak, women, she wrote, were like willows, ‘a yielding vegetable, not fit nor proper to build houses and ships’.[53] They might exceed men in beauty, affections, piety and charity, but women didn’t have the judgement, understanding and rhetorical skills of men.

There could hardly be a more depressing demonstration of the damage that systemic misogyny can do to a woman’s self-esteem. For all her bravado, every word of this sprang from her insecurities at her failings and mistakes, and she had a long way to go before she truly understood the root cause of her disadvantage. In anticipation of more accusations of intellectual theft, she added numerous epistles to her book to protest that her work was her own, that ‘my head was the forge, my thoughts the anvil to beat them out’. William was her tutor, and she his scholar, she admitted, but she had never received professional teaching from any ‘proper’ philosophers. The need to defend herself and her work would seemingly never end.

The year 1654 had been a bad one from the start: in February, the Cavendishes had received the news from England that Sir Charles had died, weakened by the fever he had caught the year before, and the effect was crushing. William had lost his brother, and Margaret a close friend, but both had lost the man they viewed as their saviour – Sir Charles had consistently lent them money and support, rescued the family estates from the Parliamentarians, even kept them from starvation. Margaret would later refer to him as ‘the preserver of my life’.[54] They owed him everything, and his loss plunged the couple into melancholy and illness.

Work was Margaret’s medicine this time, and despite the setbacks, her intellectual life was burgeoning. Friendships with scholarly types such as Constantijn Huygens allowed her to discuss her ever-expanding reading and the experiments she conducted in her laboratory, and to test her theories against other minds besides her husband’s, while every spare minute was spent writing it all down.

Her next book, Philosophical and Physical Opinions, published in 1655, expanded on earlier ideas, offering an exhaustive theory of the natural world and all its phenomena, and her prefaces and addresses reflected this growing seriousness. She dedicated the work to Oxford and Cambridge, the universities she aspired to attend but was categorically excluded from.

The publication of The World’s Olio the previous year had provoked yet more tiresome accusations that the work could not possibly be all hers, prompting Margaret to include in her prefaces increasingly irritable repudiations of the charges levelled at her by this ‘ill-natured and unbelieving age’. She was repeating herself to no effect – a woman’s word was worthless; the accusations only ceased when William weighed in on the debate in an epistle he contributed to Philosophical and Physical Opinions. It was plain to him that base prejudice was behind it all – ‘Here’s the crime,’ he stated, ‘a lady writes them, and to entrench so much upon the male prerogative is not to be forgiven’ – and at long last, Margaret was beginning to understand this too.[55] As she grew weary of the battles to gain respect and recognition for her work, her own belief in what women could achieve, and what society said they could achieve, were becoming increasingly polarised.

In her dedication to the ‘Two Universities’, she forcefully argued her new stance, asking them to accept her work ‘without a scorn, for the good encouragement of our sex, lest in time we should grow irrational as idiots’. She spoke from bitter experience when she wrote that men thought it impossible for women to acquire learning, ‘and we out of a custom of dejectedness think so too, which makes us quit all industry towards profitable knowledge’. But as her confidence in her own abilities had grown, so too had her conviction that women had ‘rational souls as well as men’, and that it was their exclusion from intellectual, civic and political life that was the source of the problem; it left women to become ‘like worms, that only live in the dull earth of ignorance … for we are kept like birds in cages, to hop up and down in our houses, not suffered to fly abroad’. Without the experience and knowledge that men had access to, it was no wonder women lacked their ‘invention’. How could they thrive when ‘we are never employed either in civil or martial affairs, our counsels are despised, and laughed at’ and ‘the best of our actions are trodden down with scorn’? And all because of ‘the over-weaning conceit men have of themselves’ and their ‘despisement of us’.[56] Well, she’d realised her mistake and found her outrage. There was no natural inferiority in women; only prejudice against them. Margaret Cavendish the proto-feminist had been born.