Excerpt from Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But there's every chance that Woolf wouldn't have wanted to insult Margaret quite as much as she did. Her brilliantly catty comments are contained within a much more nuanced reading. Woolf writes sensitively about how Margaret's burning "passion for poetry" guided her life, and her critique of Cavendish's writings is not so much concerned with their content as with their execution. Her intelligence "poured itself out… in torrents of rhyme and prose, poetry and philosophy which stand congealed in quartos and folios that nobody ever reads". In The Common Reader, Woolf even went as far as to admire "something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited" in Cavendish. Woolf did, then, follow this up with the verdict that she had the "freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of some non-human creature, its heartlessness and its charm".

Excerpted from Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock. Copyright © 2024 by Francesca Peacock. Excerpted by permission of Pegasus Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.