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Newcastle. Born into a family of well-established, Royalist East Anglian landowners, she went to court as a young woman, then accompanied Queen Henrietta Maria into exile in Paris, where she met and married the Marquess, later the Duke, of Newcastle. Her privileges – rank and riches – certainly protected her; but they also, along with her flamboyantly eccentric personal style and, most of all, her unconcealed literary ambition, made her an easy target for malicious and denigrating gossip. She was fortunate in her minism
    marriage; the Duke, much older than his wife, encouraged her Fe
    endeavours, and, after one of the many attacks on her work, remarked: ‘Here’s the crime, a lady writes them, and to entrench so much upon the male prerogative is not to be forgiven.’
    Though her situation was, in many respects, very different from that of most other women, she wrote very movingly about women’s common fears and griefs, particularly about their children: ‘the care for their well being, the fear for their ill doing, the grief for their sickness and their unsufferable sorrow for their death’. These were concerns that might afflict any woman, whatever her status.
    Cavendish began to write philosophical verse when she and her husband returned to London; as a modern biographer remarks, she felt torn between ‘the (feminine and Christian) virtue of modesty’
    and her own ambitions. She rightly took her work very seriously, but she was often forced to retreat into defensive, and self-deprecating, justifications. Writing was, she remarked apologetically, the 20
    ‘harmlessest pastime’ for leisured women; much better than, say, sitting around gossiping about the neighbours. It was a ‘proper and virtuous’ activity, and men who disapproved, she argued, should hope their own wives and daughters ‘may employ the time no worse than in honest, innocent and harmless fancies’.
    However, Cavendish certainly never regarded her own work as harmless fancy. Though she was critical of the exclusive arrogance of the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, she courageously dedicated two books to them. In 1653, when she published Poems and Fancies , she claimed that she wrote because ‘all heroic actions, public employments, powerful governments and eloquent pleadings are denied our sex in this age . . . ’. The implication being that writing in itself may be a heroic activity; and for any woman of Th her generation, it probably was. Moreover, in her 1655
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    Philosophical and Physical Opinions , she complained that g of secular feminism
    we are kept like birds in cages to hop up and down in our houses, not suffered to fly abroad . . . we are shut out of all power and authority, by reason we are never employed either in civil or martial affairs, our counsels are despised and laughed at, the best of our actions are trodden down with scorn, by the overweening conceit men have of themselves and through despisement of us.
    But in nature, she argued in the preface to The World’s Olio , written when she first returned to London but published in 1655, ‘we have as clear an understanding as men, if we were bred in schools to mature our brains and to mature our knowledge’.
    But for all her ambition and her persistence, she had few illusions and sometimes, inevitably perhaps, her courage failed her; she gloomily predicted readers’ responses to her autobiographical True Relation : ‘Why hath this lady writ her own life, since none cares to know whose daughter she was or whose wife she is, or how she was bred, or what fortunes she had, or how she lived?’
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    2. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was an intellectually astute writer who spoke out eloquently against the hostility directed at any woman regarded as outspoken or ambitious.
    And, indeed, readers were often unkind. The diarist Samuel Pepys, intensely and maliciously curious, spent weeks in 1667 tracking her around London, then, after reading