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Margaret got straight back to work on her return to Welbeck, and over the next few years she concentrated on revising more works to prove just how much she had matured as a philosopher and writer. Her new editions reflected her broadened reading and contained tightened, simplified and in some cases reversed versions of her earlier arguments, with clearer explanations, defined terminology and the fancies expunged. Significantly, she also removed her most apologetic prefaces, no longer feeling the need to make excuses for her lack of education or to convince the world that what she had to say was worth hearing. After years of self-doubt, public censure and lonely trailblazing, Margaret had finally found genuine confidence as a woman writer, secure in the knowledge that her words and opinions were as valuable as anyone else’s.

It was in the nick of time, as it turned out, because for all that anyone might have expected William – some 30 years older – to go first, it was Margaret who died suddenly on 15 December 1673. She’d been indefatigable to the last, but weakened by compulsive work, a sedentary lifestyle and years of self-inflicted bleeds and purges, she ‘soon too active for her body grew’.[83] She was 50 years old.

As befitted a duchess and a celebrity, Margaret was given a grand burial at Westminster Abbey, and although William, elderly and grief-stricken, was too ill to attend, he arranged all the pageantry for his beloved, and collected for publication all the poems and letters from scholars, friends, philosophers and poets that had been written in celebration of her, in life and after her death. He joined her three years later, aged 84, and the two have lain side by side in stone effigy ever since, where Margaret, resplendent in state robes, holds an open book, pen case and inkhorn perpetually at the ready.

From her own day to this, Margaret Cavendish has been a divisive character. With each century extracting the caricature version of her that has best suited its own cultural values, from indulged aristocrat and raving madwoman to pioneering genius and visionary proto-feminist, responses to her have rarely been measured. For all those among her contemporaries who saw an ‘illustrious whore’ and ‘atheistical philosophraster’,[84] or agreed with Pepys, Osborne and Evelyn that she was mad, there were plenty who praised her achievements: Cambridge University addressed her as Margareta I, Philosophorum Princeps – ‘Margaret the First, Prince of Philosophers’; the writers John Dryden, Richard Flecknoe and Thomas Shadwell dedicated works to both her and William, grateful for their patronage, while Dr Walter Charleton believed she had ‘convinced the world, by her own heroic example, that no studies are too hard for her softer sex’. Women writers, meanwhile, were inspired by her example. The astrologer Sarah Jinner published her first almanac in 1658, praising Margaret as an exemplar of the learned woman. And scholar, tutor and writer Bathsua Makin included Margaret in her catalogue of great women, alongside Elizabeth I, Christina of Sweden and Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, in her 1673 Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen. By the end of Margaret’s life, the ‘Queen of Sciences’[85] had earned her place in English literature and, to a precious few, demonstrated that intelligence was genderless.

Eighteenth-century commentators were as torn as their predecessors, however. The general feeling was kindly, but perhaps only because Margaret’s more challenging writings on natural philosophy and women’s advancement had by then faded into the background; she was now known as a writer of dramatic fanciful tales and poetry, and as a ‘perfect pattern of conjugal love and duty’, whose crowning glory was her biography of her husband.[86] The writer, art historian and Whig politician Horace Walpole, however, was not generous. In 1758, he sneered at her ‘unbounded passion for scribbling’ and remarked that ‘though she had written philosophy, it seems she had read none’. Walpole was at least egalitarian in his slights; he found both Margaret and William equally ridiculous, ‘a picture of foolish nobility’, tucked away together in state, ‘intoxicating one another with circumstantial flattery on what was of consequence to no mortal but themselves!’[87]

Walpole’s critique was harsh, but this was the image of the Cavendishes that carried over into subsequent centuries. Most nineteenth-century editors kept in line with public taste by selecting only Margaret’s more frivolous works for publication (they particularly liked her poems on fairies), omitting anything they viewed as coarse or controversial. Yet despite this bowdlerisation, it was around this time that Margaret was first dubbed ‘Mad Madge’, a title that reduced her to some kind of lovable twit and entirely dismissed her intelligence, diversity and originality.[88]

Saddled with this dubious new moniker, her reputation was at its lowest at the onset of the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf shared Walpole’s vision of Margaret as a ‘lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers’, scribbling away ‘without audience or criticism’, and her opinion was influential. Infuriated by her upper-class impunity to criticism and her informal, undisciplined, unscholarly approach to writing, she saw in Margaret a woman with all ‘the irresponsibility of a child and the arrogance of a duchess’,[89] whose imagination was allowed to run rampant, ‘as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death’.[90] In the end, half admiring, half despairing, she summed up Margaret as ‘noble and quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted’ – only perpetuating the ‘crazy duchess’ theory.[91]

But this is the twenty-first century; as the Cheshire Cat would say, we’re all mad here. The very traits that appalled our ancestors are what appeal to us today – Margaret’s raw energy; her bold, riotous mind and unbridled curiosity; her daring, originality, versatility, ambition and eccentricity; take any of them away and it would dull her brilliance. At last she can be wholeheartedly applauded for confounding every traditional notion of what a woman should, or could, be: scientist, thinker, philosopher and one of the most flamboyant and prolific writers (male or female) of her era.

True, she was no ready-made feminist icon, but if anything, her faltering journey towards enlightenment only adds to her fascination. Throughout her imperfect career, we see almost in real time the development of a woman shaking off the barnacles of patriarchal thinking, building her confidence and learning to trust her own talent until she genuinely believes in what women can do. It’s the culmination of this process, her extraordinary, genre-defying Blazing World – not her biography of her husband – that is now regarded as her greatest work; beloved by feminist scholars, it’s one of the few still available in print.

Inevitably, Margaret’s privileged social position allowed her the relative freedom to kick down barriers that other women couldn’t, enabling her to achieve a number of historic firsts. But she was acutely aware of the perils of what she was doing. A woman of wit in seventeenth-century England ‘loses her reputation’, she wrote, for wit is sometimes ‘satirical and sometimes amorous and sometimes wanton’; it strays into ‘unfeminine’ subjects and employs coarse language, all of which ‘women should shun’. Judged by such standards, she may not have fitted anyone’s definition of either a woman or a wit except her own, but it paid off in the long run – and it was the long run that mattered to Margaret. Fame and immortality were her heart’s immodest desire, and while she found them during her lifetime, it’s perhaps only now that she is gaining the reputation she both wanted and deserves. ‘I would be known to the world by my wit, not by my folly,’ she wrote. And, ‘Who knows but after my honourable burial, I may have a glorious resurrection in following ages, since time brings strange and unusual things to pass.’[92] She was right. It would take nearly four centuries, but the day would come when the world was ready for Margaret the First, Duchess of Newcastle.