Margaret The First
Author | Dutton, Danielle |
---|---|
Year | 2015 |
First published | 2016 |
Publisher | New York: Catapult |
Number of pages | 160 |
Edition | First US Paperback |
ISBN | 9781936787357 |
Keywords | Continental Europe, women in science, FMS Library Book, historical, biographical (fiction or non-fiction), female scientist |
Abstract
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, rather than “historical fiction.”
Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, it
is a gorgeous and wholly new narrative approach to imagining the life of
a historical woman. (Catapult)