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Described in the "Guardian" as 'a small miracle of imaginative sympathy', this novel on Margaret Cavendish's contribution to seventeenth century thought and literature - seeing her become the first woman invited to the Royal Society - is available here in paperback.
About the author
Danielle Dutton is the author of a collection of prose pieces, Attempts at a Life, and a novel, SPRAWL, which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award. She also wrote the text for Here Comes Kitty: a comic opera, an artist book of collages by Richard Kraft. Her fiction has appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, The White Review, and other periodicals. Dutton, who grew up in Central California, holds a PhD from the University of Denver and a MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the founder of the publishing house Dorothy, and teaches at Washington University in St Louis, where she lives with her husband and son.
Summary
An inventive, spirited novel about a pioneering woman who was shamed for daring to challenge male dominance in the arts and sciences four centuries ago.
Margaret Cavendish was the first woman to address the Royal Society and the first Englishwoman to write explicitly for publication. Wildly unconventional, she was championed by her forward-thinking husband and nicknamed ‘Mad Madge’ by her many detractors. Later, Virginia Woolf would write, ‘What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind!’
Unjustly neglected by history, here Margaret is brought intimately and memorably to life, tumbling pell-mell across the pages of this exhilarating novel — a portrait of a woman whose ambitions were centuries ahead of her time.
Foreword
An inventive, spirited novel about a pioneering woman who was shamed for daring to challenge male dominance in the arts and sciences four centuries ago.
Additional text
‘In Margaret the First, there is plenty of room for play. Dutton’s work serves to emphasize the ambiguities of archival proof, restoring historical narratives to what they have perhaps always already been: provoking and serious fantasies, convincing reconstructions, true fictions.’
