Mad Madge, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Royalist, Writer & Romantic.
Mad Madge designed her own clothes and her coach was black with silver decoration. As John Evelyn wrote, gentlemen visitors were 'much pleased by her extraordinary fanciful habit, garb, and discourse.
Born into an East Anglian royalist family in 1623, young Margaret Lucas went into Court service, accompanying the Queen, Henrietta Maria, to Oxford during the Civil War and sharing her hair-raising escape to France in 1644. In Paris, she met and married William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle, a great horseman. They lived together in exile for 10 years, as part of the émigré royalist circle that included aristocrats and the intellectual giants of the day.
Margaret loved poetry and philosophy and became a writer. Plays, short fiction, fantasies, science fiction and verse, orations, letters, essays, an autobiography and a biography, six philosophical treatises, and one utopia. She made her mark as one of the most determined and prolific female writers of the time. Society was shocked that she dared to publish under her own name when less than one percent of published works were by women.
- Paperback
- 436 pages
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