Danielle Dutton

Margaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional 17th-century Duchess. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when "being a writer" was not an option open to women. As one of the Queen's attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, she was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. As the English Civil War raged on, Margaret met and married William Cavendish, who encouraged her writing and her desire for a career. After the War, her work earned her both fame and infamy in England: at the dawn of daily newspapers, she was "Mad Madge," an original tabloid celebrity. Yet Margaret was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of London--a mainstay of the Scientific Revolution--and the last for another two hundred years. Margaret the First is very much a contemporary novel set in the past. Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, it is a gorgeous and wholly new approach to imagining the life of a historical woman.

Margaret the First

Vilandra

This reads more like a short story. There weren’t enough factual events - it seemed like someone read Margaret Cavendish’s Wikipedia page and then made up a bunch of day to day things to write about. This showcases the writing more than the (almost nonexistent) story - I don’t have a good sense of Margaret’s life or work.

Jade Flynn

This book was a solid five star read for me with writing that was both evocative and punctilious until it switched from her narrative into what felt like a biographical account of her life. If I wanted a biography I would've picked up a biography and from then on it felt like I was held at a distance from Margaret herself. An extraordinary lady. Very avant-garde. A good idea but ultimately a novel with an identity crisis.

Cait

Bill Mazza

‘I am as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be; though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First.’ When Margaret Cavendish addressed the Royal Society in 1667, Samuel Pepys recorded that her dress was ‘so antic and her deportment so unordinary, that I do not like her at all’. And indeed, here vividly brought to life by Danielle Dutton, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional duchess is wholly ‘unordinary’, and all the better for it. Exiled to Paris at the start of the English Civil War, Margaret meets and marries William Cavendish and, with his encouragement, begins publishing volumes of poetry and philosophy, which soon become the talk of London. After the Restoration, upon their return to England, Margaret’s infamy grows. She causes controversy wherever she goes, once attending the theatre with breasts bared, and earns herself the nickname ‘Mad Madge’. Yet while scorned by many, to others Margaret is a visionary, and to later readers — including Virginia Woolf — she was to become an early precursor of feminism. She was the first woman invited to the Royal Society — and the last for 200 years — and the first Englishwoman to write explicitly for publication. Unjustly neglected by history, Margaret the First — as she styled herself — was a bright, shining paradox. Here, she is brought intimately and memorably to life, tumbling pell-mell across the pages of this exhilarating novel — an 'unordinary' portrait of a woman whose ambitions, and marriage, were often centuries ahead of her time.

Margaret the First

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