Margaret the First

A vivid, sharp novel dramatising the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy but audacious seventeenth-century duchess who was the first woman in England to write for publication — volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction. This is the little-known story of a woman whose ambitions were centuries ahead of her time.

A royalist, she was exiled to Paris at the start of the English Civil War, where she met and married William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, an aristocrat who encouraged both her writing and her desire for a career — a striking relationship, then or now. After Cromwell’s defeat, Margaret and William returned to England, where her work, behaviour, and sense of style — including attending the theatre topless — made her a national figure. At the dawn of daily newspapers, ‘Mad Madge’ was an early tabloid sleb, yet she was also the first woman to be invited to speak at the Royal Society of London, the mainstay of the Scientific Revolution; and she was the last for another two hundred years.

Margaret the First is an intimate, zestful portrait of a woman whose life was a bright, shining paradox, but who is now unjustly neglected. Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, the novel also revels in the physicality of a garden or a gown, and turns tender in its rendering of family and marital ties. It is a great novel.