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Now in her early forties, Margaret was a name to be reckoned with. The Duchess of Newcastle’s next book, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, published in 1666, again skewered the works of well-known figures such as Robert Boyle and Henry Power, but particularly Robert Hooke’s Micrographia – a book that recorded in intricate illustrations his findings under the microscope. As a founder member of the Royal Society, Hooke was delivering a powerful defence of its empirical modus operandi, but Margaret took issue with this approach. She and William owned a fine collection of microscopes and telescopes and, knowing how temperamental these early instruments were, she argued that they produced ‘fallacies, rather than discoveries of truth’, distorting more than they revealed and explaining only the exterior workings. Her rejection of experimentalism in favour of pure old-fashioned reasoning hasn’t aged so well, but she was in good company at the time: philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and physician Thomas Sydenham all shared her scepticism and later produced their own attacks on the Society and its methods.

What has stood the test of time is the appendix Margaret wrote as a ‘work of fancy’ to amuse herself and her readers after all this heavy theorising. Conceived in the midst of the Scientific Revolution and in the wake of the Age of Exploration, The Description of a New World, called the Blazing World was the most imaginative, exotic, genre-busting work of Margaret’s career. A romance novella, fantasy adventure, philosophical utopia and theological debate all in one, this indefinable tale takes us to an alternate universe and makes a strong case for being one of the first examples of science fiction in English literature and – 150 years before Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – the first ever to be written by a woman.

Interplanetary flights of fancy had been imagined before in other languages, but Margaret was quick to assert her originality; hers was a world ‘not such as Lucian’s, or the French-man’s world in the moon; but a world of my own creating’. And this was key to her romantic ambitions. As an ‘Authoress’, she could attain all the power in her imaginary world that, as a woman, she was denied in her own, for ‘though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did … I have made a world of my own.’[67] If her readers liked this other world, they could elect to be her subjects, and if not, this was no tyranny: ‘they may create worlds of their own, and govern themselves as they please’.[68]

In the first part of The Blazing World, which Margaret calls ‘romancical’, she upcycles many of the plot devices and philosophical ideas that appear in her earlier writings. A young woman is carried off against her will by a predatory man but is rescued by a shipwreck that carries her into another world, joined to her own at the North Pole. It’s called ‘the Blazing World’ because its stars are so bright they light up the night as if it were day. In this fantastical paradise, the land is ‘rich, and fruitful’, the cities are made of marble, amber, coral and gold, and there is no use for guns because the inhabitants ‘had no other enemies but the winds’. Here, human and animal merge. There are men ‘like foxes, only walking in an upright shape’ or with ‘heads, beaks, and feathers, like wild-geese’; ‘some were bear-men, some worm-men … some bird-men, some fly-men, some ant-men’, their skin a rainbow of colours – ‘some of a deep purple, some of a grass-green, some of a scarlet’, and so it goes on.

Quick as a flash, the young woman is married to the Emperor and, as Empress, is granted absolute power to govern this land as she pleases. Her first priority is to embark on a course of philosophical study – much like Margaret’s own – to enable her to govern as wisely as possible. So begins the ‘philosophical’ part of the narrative, in which the Empress calls together the great thinkers of this world, its priests and statesmen as well as ‘immaterial spirits’, to question them on their system of government (a monarchy, of course) and consult them on scientific and philosophical matters, from astronomy and weather phenomena to natural history, mathematics, logic, atoms, theology and ‘the beginning of forms’. Then she begins to make changes: she dissolves the societies she doesn’t approve of and forms new ones, and even establishes her own female-centric religion, though she ensures that this world, unlike the real one, is conspicuously free from religious persecution, with the Empress keeping her subjects ‘in a constant belief, without enforcement or blood-shed’.

In the final ‘fantastical’ section, Margaret pulls off a supreme act of vanity by making a surprise cameo as the scribe whose soul is sum-moned to help the Empress set down her founding constitution. In yet another same-sex tease, the two women form a deep, lover-like bond, travelling together to Margaret’s world to observe William; their two souls inhabit his body for a time, before Margaret is appointed the Empress’s chief advisor when invasion threatens her native country.

It’s an audacious, inventive, wonderfully weird piece of fiction – the culmination of all Margaret’s long-held ambitions to cast herself as a romance heroine, where the real and unreal, fantasy and autobiography meet.[69] Here, Margaret the First, ruler of her own imaginary empire, uses her power to create a proto-feminist utopia, free from war and religious division, where there is ‘no difference of sexes’ and women can fully participate in civic life. Only in the wildest alternate reality did such things seem possible, so Margaret created in make-believe what she couldn’t find in life: power, peace and gender equality.

As if to provide an antidote to her own oddity, Margaret’s next book was far less radical and, probably for that very reason, her most respected work during her lifetime. The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, published in 1667, was a straightforward biography of her husband, whose reputation needed a little rehabilitation; his flight from the Battle of Marston Moor hadn’t been forgotten and many of his rivals now thought him too old and unfit for political involvement. Unlike many of Margaret’s previous works, it was taken seriously by most. The historian John Rushworth used it as a source for his work on the Civil War, and two women were inspired to write similar biographies defending their husband’s war records: Lucy Hutchinson from the Parliamentarian side and Anne Fanshawe on the Royalist. Clearly, celebrating the achievements of her husband was considered a far more admirable use of Margaret’s time than scribbling on natural philosophy, outlandish other worlds or indeed her own life. And it was a celebration: as well as detailing William’s daily habits and activities, his upbringing and character, the book was a highly partial account of his political and military career, glorifying his successes, glancing over the stickier moments and hitting back at his detractors. This was William as Royalist martyr, a man who had stoically endured exile and financial castration for his loyalty to the King. The result was still remarkable in its way – it was the first biography of a husband by his wife, and was produced by a female publisher[70] – but inevitably it was a romanticised portrait seen through an adoring lover’s eyes.

As such, it still drew criticism. Samuel Pepys, always quick to belittle Margaret since she had disappointed him at the Royal Society earlier that year, began reading it the following spring but soon declared it a ‘ridiculous history’ that showed her to be ‘a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman, and [William] an ass to suffer [her] to write what she writes to him and of him’.[71] William’s crime in encouraging, rather than forbidding, his wife’s writing is ranked almost equal with Margaret’s insanity in writing it in the first place. The work was so overtly panegyric, likening the Duke’s deeds to those of Caesar, and at the same time so banal (who cared what he ate for dinner, how long he took to dress or how much money he had lost?) that, for Pepys, it was rendered an undignified and vulgar exercise that made both of them look absurd and Margaret – as usual – mad.