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Summary and Reviews of Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock

Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock

Pure Wit

The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish

by Francesca Peacock
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  • Jan 2, 2024, 384 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

A biography of the remarkable - and in her time scandalous - seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish, who pioneered the science fiction novel.

"My ambition is not only to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole world." —Margaret Cavendish

Margaret Cavendish, then Lucas, was born in 1623 to an aristocratic family. In 1644, as England descended into civil war, she joined the court of the formidable Queen Henrietta Maria at Oxford. With the rest of the court she went into self-imposed exile in France. Her family's wealth and lands were forfeited by Parliament. It was in France that she met her partner, William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a marriage that made her the Duchess of Newcastle and would remain at the heart of both her life and career.

Margaret was a passionate writer. She wrote extensively on gender, science, philosophy, and published under her own name at a time when women simply did not do so. Her greatest work was The Blazing World, published in 1666, a utopian proto-novel that is thought to be one of the earliest works of science fiction that brought together Margaret's talents in poetry, philosophy, and science.

Yet hers is a legacy that has long divided opinion, and history has largely forgotten her, an undeserved fate for a brilliant, courageous proto-feminist. In Pure Wit, Francesca Peacock remedies this omission and shines a spotlight on the fascinating, pioneering, yet often complex and controversial life, of the multi-faceted Margaret Cavendish.

Introduction

The empress and authoress of a whole world

In April 1667, Margaret Cavendish was the talk of London society. At the first performance of The Humorous Lovers – a play everyone believed was by her though it was, in fact, written by her husband, the Duke of Newcastle – she had chosen an extravagantly provocative outfit. Sitting in the audience, she wore a dress so low-cut that "her breasts" were "all laid out to view". As if that boldness were not enough, she had even completed the look with "scarlet trimmed nipples". In a riotously bizarre letter to his father, the young man-about-town Charles North described the situation succinctly: "the Duchess Newcastle is all the pageant now discoursed on". In North's rather fantastical account, she had apparently tried to enter the playhouse in either a "triumphal chariot" pulled by two horses, or an even more glamorous one pulled by "8 white bulls", before then sneaking in "incognito". That same spring, the Restoration ...

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

The book delves into Cavendish's philosophical writing, tracking the development of her thinking and apparent confidence in her own theories, and putting them in context for modern readers. Cavendish developed a theory of vitalist materialism, and strongly opposed the theory of mind-body dualism and the existence of a separate spirit world, though she did later clarify that she believed in God. Peacock connects that philosophy, and Cavendish's difficult relationship with the male-dominated intellectual circles that responded to it, with her story The Blazing World, one of the earliest existing works of science fiction. Peacock doesn't defend Cavendish's authoritarian ideas and failure to understand her opponents'—particularly Parliamentarian opponents'—viewpoints. Instead, she calls for Cavendish to receive the same scholarly attention that other writers of her time have, rather than the dismissal as "eccentric" or "mad" that she has historically been subject to...continued

Full Review Members Only (719 words)

(Reviewed by Katharine Blatchford).

Media Reviews

The Millions
A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves.

Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review
In Pure Wit, Francesca Peacock makes a fresh case for the writer Margaret Cavendish's place in the feminist canon. Peacock works hard to situate her subject alongside other iconoclasts. This is probably the first time Cavendish has been likened to David Bowie and bell hooks, and it would no doubt delight her.

Ruth Scurr, The Wall Street Journal
Peacock is at her best explaining Cavendish's literary achievements. This extraordinary and contradictory woman—shy, reclusive, and a compulsive exhibitionist, dashing into print at every opportunity as a bulwark against mortality, has a far greater claim on our attention than Virginia Woolf believed. Three and a half centuries after her death at the age of fifty, the world is finally ready to stop being afraid of Margaret Cavendish.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
An engaging portrait of a significant 17th-century cultural figure...Drawing on a wealth of sources, she counters the trivializing image of Cavendish as 'some strange combination of a costumed actress, unreal goddess, and magical princess'...A sensitive, nuanced biography of an idiosyncratic woman.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Journalist Peacock debuts with an excellent biography of 17th-century English author and 'proto-feminist' Margaret Cavendish (née Lucas)...Peacock captures Cavendish's larger-than-life persona...and perceptively teases out her contradictions.

Alice Loxton, historian and lead presenter at History Hit TV
Margaret Cavendish's story is one crackling with passion, ambition and scandal, and Peacock's account does it full justice. Scholarly, articulate, and never less than fascinating, this is a sensational debut.

Author Blurb Jessie Childs, award-winning author of The Siege of Loyalty House
A stellar debut. Francesca Peacock is as bold, bright and witty as her subject. Margaret Cavendish sears through every page and so does her blazing world.

Author Blurb Kate Mosse, New York Times bestselling author of Labyrinth
It's a gripping read, wonderfully researched and puts Cavendish back into the literary history books where she belongs. I loved it.

Reader Reviews

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Beyond the Book



Margaret Cavendish and Vitalist Materialism

Title page and frontispiece of Cavendish's 1668 Grounds of Natural Philosophy In her biography of 17th-century author Margaret Cavendish, Pure Wit, Francesca Peacock shines light on often-overlooked aspects of Cavendish's life and work, including her contributions to Western philosophy. From the beginning of her philosophical career, she believed in materialism. Simply put, this is the theory that everything that exists is material and that the events we observe in the world are the result of interactions between matter.

This theory rejects the idea of an incorporeal spiritual world—in a materialist view, the soul is either made up of matter like the physical world, or does not exist. In her early writings, Cavendish was a proponent of atomism, a branch of materialism that suggests that the universe is ...

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Read-Alikes

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