MAD, CONCEITED, RIDICULOUS

Why Margaret Cavendish was considered both a genius and an eccentric.

- MERVE EMRE

“I Write to Please my Self,” Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of New

castle, declared in her “Orations of Divers Sorts” (1662). A shy, solitary woman with a passion for poetry and scientific inquiry—what did she see when she peered inside “Natures Cabinet, the Braine”? She saw “Fans of Opinion,” “Gloves of Remembrance, Veiles of Forgetfulnesse,” “Pendants of Understanding” to adorn the ears of the wisest women. She saw “Black Patches of Ignorance, to stick on/The Face of Fooles.” Brightest of all were the “Ribbons of Fancies.” By “fancy,” she meant the wild, inventive faculty of the mind which allowed her to see forgetfulness as a veil or

the brain as a cabinet in the first place. From her cabinet tumbled some of

the strangest prose and verse of the seventeenth century, beginning, in 1653, with her “Poems, and Fancies”:

When Nature first this World she did create, She cal’d a Counsell how the same might make; Motion was first, who had a subtle wit, And then came Life, and Forme, and Mat

ter fit.

Do not be fooled by these sweet couplets. They were the prelude to an enormously ambitious philosophy of nature’s diffuse, uneasy vitality. Across almost three hundred poems, Cavendish speculated about how atoms joined