Margaret the First

Danielle Dutton’s stunning new novel dramatises the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy but audacious seventeenth-century duchess who was the first woman in England to write for publication — volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction — a woman whose ambitions were centuries ahead of her time.

As one of the queen’s attendants, Margaret Lucas was exiled to France at the start of the English Civil War. In Paris, she married William Cavendish, an aristocrat who encouraged both her writing and her desire for a career — a singular relationship. After Cromwell’s defeat, Margaret and William returned to England, where her work, behaviour, and sense of style — including once attending the theater in a topless gown — earned her both infamy and fame. At the dawn of daily newspapers, ‘Mad Madge’ was a tabloid celebrity, yet she 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 an intimate portrait of a woman whose life was a brilliant paradox, but who is now largely unknown. Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, the novel also revels in the physicality of a garden or a gown, and turns tender in its rendering of family and marital ties.