Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - 17th Century Sci-Fi Writer & 'It Girl': Margaret Cavendish

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

Margaret Cavendish was extraordinary for any time, let alone the 17th century.She was a trailblazer in fiction, writing and publishing what many believe to be the first science fiction book - her 1666 work 'Blazing World' imagined a planet led by an Empress.The story also featured a lesbian affair between the Empress and herself, Margaret Cavendish. Truly, fantastic.She played a provocative and starring role amongst London's elite, and Samuel Pepys was obsessed with meeting her.How did he describe her? Why was she the talk of the town in 17th century London? Joining Kate today is Francesca Peacock, author of Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish. This episode was edited by Teän Stewart-Murray, the producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts.Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code BETWIXTTHESHEETS1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. It's me, K. Lister, you are listening to Betwixter sheets. And I'm so pleased that you are. But before we can go any further in our little journey together, you know what's coming. That's right. It's the fair dues warning. Here we go.

This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way covering a range of adult subjects. And you should be an adult too. And if you're not, be off with you. Turn this off immediately. go and watch octanauts or something more wholesome. For the rest of you that are still here, let's do this. Get your glad rags on, betwixters.

We are off to the theatre. Don't say that I do not spoil you. Oh, oh, and by the way, this is the 17th century, so do dress accordingly. Actually, whatever you wear, it doesn't matter, because you are going to be upstaged by the marvellously eccentric writer Margaret Cabandish. Never heard of her?

Well, we are about to put that right. The 1666 work, Blazing World, is possibly the world's first science fiction book. Oh yeah, it was about a world led by an empress who had an affair with of all people, Margaret herself. Well played, Maggie, well played. Aha, here she comes now. Arriving in a coach drawn by eight bulls, obviously, stepping into the theatre wearing a dress cut below her rougeed and tasseled nipples. Oh yeah, oh yeah. He heard that right, nipple tassels.

This chick is rocking nipple tassels. All this from a woman who insists that she's actually quite shy. Huh. Okay, Maggie. Okay. Let's head inside. We have got to meet her. What do you look for a man?

Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning the knob and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful dam. Goodness had nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello and welcome back to Ptwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. What could we possibly say about the incredible Margaret Cavendish? Well, take it from Virginia Wolf, who described her as a bogey to frighten clever girls with. Well, I'm on board.

She was a literary pioneer at a time when women rarely published their own works, let alone science fiction novels featuring lesbian affairs that they've written themselves into. Her work explored women's rights and their role in society. She was a point of fascination for London's social elite, including the diarist Samuel Pepys. Well, I mean, he was fascinated with a lot of women, but he was particularly fascinated with her. To introduce this woman and her complicated legacy, I am joined by Francesca Peacock, author of Pure Witt, The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish. Curious to know more? I know I am, so let's do this. Hello and welcome to Betwicks the Sheets.

It's only Francesca Peacock. How are you doing? I'm doing very well, thank you. How are you? Beyond excited to talk to you about this historical figure that I'd heard the name mentioned in various accounts and various historical sources, but I didn't know much about her at all. we're talking about Margaret Cavendish, who is she such a fascinating historical figure and we'll get into her. But what brought you to her? How did you first encounter this, this completely mad woman? So I was interested in a group of women who were slightly less mad, who were working in the early 18th century and writing poems and letters and all of these things.

And I was, I think, probably talking far too much about them to someone at some point. And somebody turned to me and said, you really need to read some Margaret Cavendish. and I went away and I bought a copy of The Blazing World, which I'm sure we'll talk about later, and I finished it in one night and was just completely obsessed. This utterly wild story with a new world and golden submarines and bear men and the North Pole, and I just thought, who on earth was writing this in the late 17th century?

This is absolutely amazing. I'm not surprised. So for anyone listening, I'm sure there'll be lots of people who are thinking, I don't know who this person is, but you will by the time we finish this podcast. Give us a quick introduction to who Margaret Cavendish is. Apart, well, so we know she's possibly the first person to have written a sci-fi book. But who else was she?

What's her origin story? Yes. So there's a huge number of firsts we can associate with her. She's probably the first person to have written a sci-fi book. She's possibly England's first female professional author before Afroben. She's one of England's earliest female philosophers, writers and scientists. So she's born in 1623, so just before the English Civil War, and she later becomes the first Duchess of Newcastle,

so a woman married into the aristocracy. But her life is completely wild. She goes into exile with Queen Henrietta Maria, lives a lot of her life in France, and then marries the Duke of Newcastle, although at that point he's not a Duke, in the 1640s, and rapidly becomes this kind of 17th century celebrity.

She's one of the first women to write books, one of first kind of professional celebrity authors, and she is completely an utterly wild, like a figure who really deserves more attention to be paid to her. I think one of my favourite things that anyone's ever said about her was Virginia Woolf, and she said she was a bogey to frighten clever girls with. Yeah. Oh, I love that. That is such a thing.

I'm not... Was that a compliment or not? It's such a brilliant line. So Virginia Woolf writes about her in a room of one's own and then a bit later in The Common Reader. So she writes two essays in her. She also calls her a giant cucumber who chokes all of the other flowers in the garden,

all of the other roses and the pretty flowers because she grows too much and strangles them all. She also calls her bird-brained and half-witted, I think, as well. So they're brilliant, brilliant lines, but a giant bogey to scare clever girls with is the absolute best. And it's because she kind of saw her as a crazy figure as a woman who'd written far too much without knowing what she was writing

rather than as an intellectual figure to be revered or studied. So Virginia Woolf is kind of famously cruel about her, yeah. That's because when I read that, I couldn't work out if she's saying something nice or something nasty. Because if someone said that about me, I'd be like, oh, yes. Thanks a lot. I was like, no, no, that wasn't a compliment. So she's got that reputation as being a wild one,

one of history's wild, wild people. But was she born into money? Was she born into the aristocracy? So she wasn't born into the aristocracy. She does end up as one of history's wild ones. So there are like loads of, she appears across sources in the whole 17th century, including a moment of like an apocryphal story

where King Charles II after the restoration sees like a flash of colour and somebody wearing a really bizarre outfit out of the corner of his eye and he thinks it's immediately moderate in Cavendish. So she becomes this figure who's like known, synonymous for being wearing crazy clothes and being a kind of celebrity. But she's born to a wealthy but not particularly aristocratic family

in Essex. so on like former monastic land near Colchester. And then her family are like wealthy. They had got money through knowing people close to the crown and court appointments and being lawyers, but they're not particularly aristocratic. And by the time she's born, all of her elder siblings, she's the youngest, are probably married, they've moved out, they've got jobs.

But her family have like quite a bizarre history. So her mother had given birth to Margaret's eldest brother when she was very young in her teenage years. She was unmarried because the man who got her pregnant, Margaret's father, had to go into exile before he could marry her because he got involved in a jewel and had been sent away and wasn't allowed back until he got a royal pardon. Scandalous!

So her family history is quite interesting. Wow! Really scandalous. And so she grows up like kind of knowing all of this and being the youngest out of all of them. So while they were off, you know, having very adult lives, her brothers were soldiers or men of the world and her sisters had married, she spent her time writing and reading.

So she describes how she would spend all of her days writing in her baby books and making her own clothes because she saw clothes as like a toy to entertain herself with. So she was always famed for really bizarre fashion. But one day when she's in her very late teenage years, life suddenly really changes for her because her family are royalist. They're not Catholics, but in a moment of violence, which people have now tied towards catered of the Catholics at the time, and to do with the growing...

about to be the Civil War, a group of townspeople from Colchester attack her family house, ransack it of absolutely everything down from like plates, cutlery, down to bed sheets, take everything out and stab the family coffins and lead Margaret's mother out to the town's jail. Yeah, her life like kind of really suddenly changes with the beginning of the Civil War. Holy crap. The family home was just sieged. Like it was just, they just, they, just attacked it, dragged the mother. Why were they stabbing coffins? Why would you do that? So this happens in the very early 1640s and six years later, so really not that long until later, it happens again, but this time they stabbed the family coffins and there are new bodies in the

in the graves because during that time Margaret's sister and her mother had died and they cut off their heads to use their hair as wigs to like maraud around him. So incredible like bodily violence. Yeah, it's horrible. And they were doing it because it's kind of an ultimate act of deseges Yeah, go back, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. They cut the hair off the dead bodies of her mother and her sister to make wigs. Yeah, because the corpses weren't fully decomposed yet, because they were very, very new. And so, yeah, they cut them off, so they open the coffins, open them, and then wear them around as wigs. It's really horrifying.

So you've got this kind of, like, extreme background of violence and the fact that, like, our whole family life had quite quickly disintegrated. And it's such a, such a symbol of kind of ending. something if you're stabbing people's family vaults and coffins. I mean, what a brilliant image of ending a family line or ending a dynasty or ending any kind of, yeah. I'm getting very home up on this now. Was it that they needed wings and they opened the coffins and went, oh, that's lucky, we need hair? Or was it like that was like in itself was an act of violation? Like, ha ha ha, we're wearing your mum's hair. Exactly. I think it's an active violation and it's an active performance and kind of just falls into all the descriptions

of the violence from the civil wars, which are really horrifying. But also, we have to take some of this with a pinch of salt, because a lot of it will come from, like, royalist newspapers, for example. And did they hype up the level of violence in order to make the parliamentarians seem more despicable? But yes, yes, they did cut off the hair and wear it around. I need to move on from this. I know I do, but I'm, like, stuck on it now.

Just like, why? Right, okay, I'm going to, moving on. What happened to Margaret throughout the rest of the civil war? Did she have a good civil war? Yeah, really interesting question. So we can't actually tell if she was one of the women who was led to the county jail during that first moment of violence

because she doesn't describe it in her own autobiography, but is there a chance it was too traumatic to relay, perhaps? But the sources definitely suggest, at least one source, suggest that multiple daughters had been taken to the county jail, well, the town jail. But after that, Margaret and her mother and whoever was left of the family at that point,

the brothers had all joined the fighting, probably moved to London for a bit but this was a parliamentarian stronghold during the period London was very very much on the parliamentarian side and the King's court had gone into exile in Oxford and Margaret decides she wants to be a lady in waiting and lots of her writing of her childhood is about how shy and how she calls it melancholy and bashful

she is so she gets so nervous that one of her sisters has died that she stays up all night listening outside her door to check that she was still breathing for example So you have this image of a really shy woman who suddenly decides to go and join Hermita Maria as one of her ladies in waiting which is obviously quite, you know, it's a very public role and it's joining a court away from her family

and she probably decides to do it because at the time Henrietta Maria was famed for being a really, she calls herself a she generalissimo so very much involved in the war effort. She was moving arms around the country, riding with soldiers and men around on horseback. And Margaret kind of sees this and wants to join in with it So that's how she initially becomes involved in the Civil War, is as a lady in waiting.

And then while she's in Oxford, Hermitia is pregnant at this point and doesn't want to give birth with the encroaching threat of the parliamentarian forces and decides to go into exile in France. She's French. And so Margaret joins her, and it's quite a chaotic trip. So Hermita Maria gives birth, has to leave her baby behind, has to hide under a pile of leaves in a ditch whilst parliamentary enforcers are around. So they eventually join up. the channel and the whole boat is under bombardment. It's being attacked and Henrietta Maria has all of her ladies waiting on this boat and they're all crying, throwing up, screaming by all accounts and all of the sources and Henrietta Maria, to make everything worse, gives an instruction to

the captain of the boat that if it looks like they're about to be captured, he's to blow up the whole ship and kill them all rather than let them be captured. So it's a horrifying journey and they eventually arrive and Henrietta Maria is more like a kind of, you know, decrepit woman in a weird novel rather than an actual queen and then they go into exile in Paris. So her civil war is, she's really very much involved with everything that kind of happens. And while she's in France, she can't speak any French, so her shyness gets quite a lot worse and she's sitting at the court, kind of hating her life. She later writes plays about this. She later writes a play where she gives herself a character in the plays and her character

quite amusingly doesn't say a single word on stage. So she doesn't really see herself as having a happy, active life. But while she's there, a man one day turns up with ridiculous horses and a beautiful, flamboyant coach. And she kind of likes him, despite the fact he's three decades older than her. And quite quickly, they start exchanging saucy love letters and they get married. And that's William Cavendish. Oh, hello. How did she get the gig as the Queen's lady in waiting? Because one time, I wanted a job in a bar, so I just walked in and said that someone had called me in for an interview when they hadn't it was a complete lie and I got a job because no one knew what they were doing did she do that did she just turn up and just go um here to be a lady in waiting i think it's probably

quite similar so she is she's uh 19 or 20 quite young and her brother is fighting Charles Cavendish is fighting quite high up on the royalist side her other brother is fighting in Ireland and she has one other brother who's involved so they're known as royalists and henrietta maria didn't have that many ladies in waiting at the time because people had quite now actually not wanted to, you know, join her in her court, for example, or everyone was scattered around the country, people were being besieged in their houses. So I think it's kind of a combination of wartime lack of people and the fact that her family were, like, royalists and known about. Especially if this queen is like, her plan B is just blow everyone up. Yeah. That would limit

your staffing option. It really would. It really would. Henry Ata-Marie is absolutely brilliant. Yeah. There's another story of her when she's brought arms over from Europe and they've landed in Bridlington, so in Yorkshire in the north of England. And she's having dinner with William Cavendish, actually. So Margaret's later to be husband. And all of a sudden they start getting bombarded again. And she runs back to her room and then goes and hides in a ditch. And then she has to realise she's left her little dog behind. So she has to run back, pick up the dog, nearly get killed again, but all to save the dog. Oh, I relate. Okay, so tell me about William Cavendish. What is he doing seducing women 30 years his junior?

What's his backstory? How did they meet? And how saucy were these letters? Yeah, so they meet in court. So he has been fighting in England and he suffers a really humiliating defeat at the Battle of Marston Moore. It was absolutely awful. And it comes through a disagreement he has with Prince Rupert on the battlefield

and a lot of people get killed and everyone blames William. So rather than try and make himself seem any better in England, he just flees, turns up in France, is flatbroke. He's left his three daughters behind in England after they've been besieged in their house, and he's not really that bothered about them at this point. He's maybe not the best father. His other wife has just died, and he turns up,

and he arrives with like seven ridiculous horses, so he looks incredibly wealthy, and he turns up and gives all of these horses away to the queen, and to the queen's mother, in a kind of demonstration of wealth, but it's actually only to try and get more credit from his lenders because if he looks wealthy people thinks he was wealthy but margaret doesn't really know that and falls in love with him and like kind of likes his flamboyance and everything and he was probably

looking for a new wife because he only had two sons and one of his sons we probably now think had something like epilepsy so suffered from fits so he probably wanted a new wife to have more heirs especially in the civil war two sons wasn't really enough if they were going to fight or get killed and he must have seen Margaret and she says that he didn't mind that she was so shy and then there are still these love letters which are in the British Library and they're kind of absolutely gorgeous

because they start right in the middle of their courtship and Margaret writes at the beginning being like pray leave the fault of my writing to my pen and quite clearly it's not the fault of her pen because her handwriting is so awful and will be awful for the rest of her life she's some of the worst handwriting of the period and they start corresponding

so Margaret will send a letter being like oh you know it was so lovely to see you how will we meet blah blah all of these things so they're kind of illicitly corresponding because it probably wouldn't have exactly been looked upon entirely favourably although the 30 year age gap wasn't something that would have phased people particularly in the period but it quite quickly becomes something more than just exchanging letters so they exchange little miniature portraits of each other and margaret has to apologise because his miniature portrait gets broken in her room and she's absolutely distraught and in one of the one of the one of the little bit of letter she writes, you must have a plot against my health because you wrote me so early,

I could not fall back asleep after I'd written to you. So it's kind of gorgeous and Margaret's are all very emotional. That's a great line. Hang on, I'm going to write that one down. That's going to be sent to someone as a late night text, that one. It is a cracker. So Margaret has like this kind of quite emotional, lovely relationship where she's clearly quite emotionally invested and she says, you must not think that I don't love you just because I can't show it. Women are meant to be more coy than men. she writes, and then we have to get on to what William's writing in response. So you'd think maybe it would be kind of similar, quite sweet letters. And at one point Margaret has to write a letter to

William, which says there's a customary law that we must observe before you can do that to me, basically. And William is writing to her, in response to her love letters, absolutely disgustingly lewd love poetry, which also exists in a manuscript in the British Library. So he tries to minimize their 30-year age gap by saying old and dry wood makes the best fire. Oh, oh, no. Oh, that's awful. Oh, oh, that's just felt my vagina seal shut forever. Yeah, at one point he rhymes cunning with funny. Oh, no. Yeah. Oh, dear. And describes like a fur muff for her, for her cunning. And she writes back, in one brilliant letter, she writes back, my lord, let your ear limit your poetry. See, I like her.

Which is kind of brilliant. Oh, like saucy, the 17th century equivalent of sexting. Yeah, completely, utterly. And they are like really quite intense and lovely. He also, you know, writes an ode to her hymen, all sorts of things which are just about on the browns of proprietary. So they're kind of brilliant. And by the end of their correspondence,

so he's also sending her poems at a rate of more than one every two days, which is quite a lot of poetry to write. and is maybe why their quality kind of suffers. But by the end of this, it's about 72 poems, I think. By the end of that, there are rumours going around the court that they've got married in secret because they're so clearly falling in love with each other. But they get married at the end of the year.

And Margaret's letters go through periods of being really loving, really exciting, really excited, and kind of also her first literary writings, because she's commenting on Williams' poetry, to also really heartbreaking letters where she describes, like, looking out on the world as if all her hopes had taken opium, as if everything was like dissolved and really tragic because, you know, she's in exile, her family are all dying in England. And by the end of the year, they're married and at the end of this manuscript in the British Library, all bound together, is a letter from Margaret's mother to the new couple

in which she congratulates them, but also just comments on how depressing and despairing she is of the whole world. So it's really tragic, but their love story is kind of really touching. Yeah. That is. I'll be back with Francesca and Margaret after this short break. Does this reputation as a wild woman come from? Because this sounds, it's definitely saucy. She's getting saucy letters.

She seemed balshy despite her reputation as, oh, I'm so shy really. Yeah. Where does the reputation as something to frighten good girls with come from? Yeah, so after she marries William, William was a soldier, but before the Civil War, he was also known as like an intellectual patron of the arts. He funded philosophical writings by Thomas Hobbes, plays by Ben Johnson and poems by Richard Fleckno. So loads of big 17th century literary names. And after they're married, the pair moved to Antwerp, where they live in Rubin's house,

so the 17th century Dutch artist who, they turf out his widow to rent his house, basically. And whilst they're living there, William, yeah, William and his brother, Charles, kind of set up something of an academy to teach Margaret things. her education would have been quite patchy before this, and they start teaching her about the world, they teach her about the solar system, they teach her about history, they teach her about so many things, and she starts writing her own letters,

and also quite crucially disagreeing with what her husband has taught her. So she gets this kind of intellectual education, and then she goes back to London in 1651 to try and get some money from the parliamentarian government because they'd seized her husband's estates, and they were always broke. And while she's back over there, something quite radical happens, she publishes her first book of writing called Poems and Fancy's

in 1653. And in the 1650s, in the whole 17th century, kind of in the whole early modern period, it was very, very rare for a woman to publish their work. And if they did publish it, to put their name to it, it would normally be anonymous or by a lady. And if women did publish their work under their own names, which is so rare, it normally would have been on something like a mother's advice book to children or a book of like Christian religious poetry and Margaret comes out with her book in 1653 it's called poems and fancies and on the title page it says written by the marcus of Newcastle Margaret Cavendish and her poems are about none of the safe stuff that you might expect she opens it up with a poem describing how the world was made and in her world the world is made by

kind of female nature rather than god so her poems about atoms she discovers writes about a new theory of atomism. She writes poems about fairies, which are kind of like the atoms moving around. She writes personal poetry about her brother, about her marriage, about her mother. And all of this is kind of wrapped up in this one book that she is not afraid or shy to put her name to. So that's kind of how she first gets a reputation for being kind of scandalous, because she's so bold. She's putting herself out on the page. And in the period, this kind of bravery was thought of as really a modest. So Afra Ben, who's the famous restoration playwright, starts publishing her work and starts, you know, writing her work for the plays, for the stage where it would have been

performed. And people write about her as if she were a whore. So she's described as only needing a pimp to set her off, because that kind of public display of yourself was almost seen as prostitution, which is so interesting. And Margaret does it kind of seemingly without fear about that. And naturally, letters start to circulate and people write letters being like, pray if you can send me a copy of Margaret Cavendish's new poetry and then in the next letter it's like don't worry I've already read it and I'm satisfied she's mad enough to be sent to bedlam so yeah the reputation for madness happens quite quickly didn't she do something with their nipples that really caught everybody's attention as well she really did so this is after the war in 1667

so after the war the restoration Margaret and William moved back to England initially to London and then they start trying to William had very big country houses they start trying to restore them and all of that, then William Begets made a duke, which makes Margaret a duchess, and she has this kind of triumphant season in London in the 1666-7, and while she's there one day, there's a play that her husband is written that's being put on in a theatre somewhere, and Margaret, everyone A, thinks the play is by Margaret,

and B, there's an absolutely brilliant letter, which is in the Bodlian, and this man who's writing it, his name's Charles North, he's got a really difficult job because he's got to write a letter to his father apologising for getting married without his permission and he has to end the letter asking for some more money and in the middle he's like what will distract my dad the most I'm going to tell him all of the gossip from London

and he describes the pageant now all discoursed on is Margaret Cavendish and he describes how this performance of the play she had not only apparently turned up in a coach pulled by eight white bulls and this was quote unquote incognito but she'd also sat in the most prominent box in the theatre with a dress cut to below the level of her nipples

which she'd then roged and attached matching tassels to. No! Yeah. Are we talking nipple tassels? We are, yeah. Proper De Sivanty's proper nipple t'all? It's so great, isn't it? I had no idea.

Yeah, and it's just utterly wild. Is there any other record of anybody wearing anything similar to this? So it's really interesting. So in the 17th century, you could, high class women, would maybe have worn dresses that were cut to below the level of their nipples, but only in quite private contexts. It was, for example, something that, you know, the royal mistresses of Charles Lassacken definitely would have worn

and are often pictured wearing dresses that are below the level of their nipples. They then might well have rouged your nipples. Roogeing your nipples was something that was also done in that context. But the combination of wearing it in public with the nipples rouged and with tassels on was really. really, really, really bizarre and like notable enough to be commented on. And she still describes herself as shy and retiring. Yeah, I know. It's kind of the absolute contradiction at the heart of her character is.

So that's not the only thing that she does, which is really bizarre. So throughout that period she's described in Samuel Pepys's diary as being kind of like a fairy or the queen of Sheba. She's kind of processing around London, being mobbed by hundreds of children who are following her everywhere, and always wearing crazy outfits. So she's the first woman to go. to the Royal Society, which is kind of the home of male scientific endeavour, and she attends in a dress, which is so long she has to have six attendant ladies to carry it, and she accessirises it with, like, a big, wide-brimmed masculine hat and a masculine coat, so that somebody writes a poem about her saying she could have been a cavalier, but that she had no beard.

So she's kind of cross-dressing, wearing ridiculous clothes, and then still insisting she's really shy. And it kind of comes down to this contradiction between her, like, performing as a celebrity and being quite introspective. She has an absolutely fascinating character, yeah. What did Peps have to say about her? Because I know he was, well, he's obsessed with lots of women, but he really wanted to catch a look of her, didn't he? He was really obsessed with her.

So it's an absolutely brilliant period in his diary where over a couple of months, you can just track him wanting to get a glance of her. He'll say something like, I'm off to court later, I think Margaret Cavendish might be there, and then the next entry would be like, didn't see her last night, we'll try again today. And he describes her co-coctuary.

moving its way around London and being besieged by people. Then he describes catching a glimpse of her just through the door and she's all wearing black and white and looks kind of like a dizzying monochrome or something. And he eventually gets to meet her and have a conversation with her when she goes to the raw society. Having previously only looked at her and described it, I think the line he uses,

the whole story of this lady is romantic and everything she does is romantic, which is a great line. But then he finally gets to meet with her and has a conversation with her, and he says, I'm satisfied that she said nothing worth hearing. Savage.

But this is Samuel Pepst in one of his diaries. He says that he jizzes in his own pants after he saw a woman that he fancied. So maybe he should take a seat. I think he was just a bit breathless and I think he thought, you know, she looks a lot better than she actually speaks. Yeah.

Which is not true, I'd argue, but yeah. No. What did she look like? Like, I know that there's all these descriptions. I mean, the woman's wearing nipple tattles, for God's sake, but was she a beautiful woman? Because I've read that she had a face covered in black patches. Yeah.

What was that? Yeah, so in kind of all of the sources, she is described as a beautiful woman. So John Evelyn, who's a restoration diarist and letter writer and quite a famous author, he becomes really quite obsessed with her to the point where his wife, Mary, absolutely detests Margaret. And you can kind of see why, because John's there every day. And he describes her as quite a beautiful woman. but then Mary disagrees and says that she isn't beautiful.

But she was wearing, she did often wear patches on her face. And what's really interesting about this is that that type of face patch either cut into presents or stars, sometimes hearts, all sorts of shapes, wasn't actually uncommon in the 17th century. It was initially it had been something which people wore to cover spots or pimples. So Samuel Pepys describes them in his diary. And then it became something that people wore to cover like syphilis sores. and we don't think Margaret had syphilis.

They were really common. People were painted in them, for example, or of that type of thing. But what is uncommon is that everyone always, in all of the writings about it, always pay special attention to Margaret, so that always described more than anyone else's. Because we do know that so many other people were wearing them.

And we think the thing is, maybe it's that Margaret was wearing them more so than other people, or that hers were like little different shapes of black velvet patches, or that she had no reason to wear them and was just wearing them for sheer style. But they kind of add to this image of a woman whose whole thing as a kind of performance and wearing all sorts of bizarre things.

But yeah, Samuel Pepys really pays special attention to describing Margaret Cavendishes, which is ironic because he describes wearing them himself. She sounds like a walking work of art. She definitely was, and there's quite a famous portrait of her painted by Peter Lely in 1665, and he's a very famous 17th century artist

who painted a lot of the aristocrat, painted the royal family, painted lots of people after the Civil War. And in the painting, she's wearing, you know, the expected dukeal robes of a Duchess, so a blue dress, an ermine-lined gown, she looks incredibly amazing. And then see if you start at the feet, it all looks normal, you pan upwards, you think, oh, lovely dress, lovely, lovely fur, you pan upwards again, and then you get to her head. And instead of wearing the expected coronet for a Duchess,

she's got this crazy philosopher's hat on, so black velvet with a, um, covered in feathers. So she's making herself look like an intellectual, but the pairing between them just makes her... Just googled it. It's wonderful, isn't it? Yeah. It really is. Yeah. Wow. Oh, go on. Go on, Maggie. Isn't it true that she wrote lesbian poetry? Is that, is that? Yeah. What is she doing there? Yeah. So earlier, I mentioned the Blazing World, which is the first, not her first work, but it was written in 1666, and it's probably her most famous work. It's now thought, to be the first work of science fiction. And it's an absolutely brilliant work

where she kind of describes a new world led by an empress who is kind of a version of Margaret Cavanaghdish herself. And this empress spends her days in scientific discovery and she has these anthropomorphic bearmen, lice men, ant men, all working under her and helping her in her scientific pursuits. And one day this woman, who was basically Margaret Cavendish herself,

decides she needs a scribe, to write down her theories about life. And she lists loads of male authors like Plato, Aristotle, and then the spirits who are talking to her say, oh no, you can't have those, the men will just want to write their own theories. And she goes through loads and loads of names, always told no,

and then she liked upon the idea of getting Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, to write this herself. So she kind of, it's a stand-in that has another stand-in. It's incredibly meta. And then once these two women, the Empress and Margaret, meet, they decide that they like each other so much, they start sharing quote-unquote platonic kisses and this kind of spiritual sex,

which doesn't count as cheating because, A, it's only spiritual, and B, it won't offend their husbands because it's between two women. I see. And so it's absolutely brilliant. And then they decide to have spiritual sex in Margaret Cavendish's husband's body, so he doesn't feel left out. Spiritual sex, that's a whole... So it's kind of brilliant, yeah.

That's a whole concept, isn't it? that's... It's hilarious. I love that. What about her own personal love life? I know she was married to William Ladd, but did she have lovers? So it's such a good question.

And some people have asked... I got asked at a talk the other week, actually, if she'd ever had a relationship with her woman because her other plays, for example, are often exploring love between women. She writes one, the conventive pleasure, which has quite a brilliant lesbian love story at the centre of it.

And we can't really... know about that. It's really hard to pin down and we don't want to speculate too much. But within her own lifetime, so when she moves to London, she's there for just over a year trying to get money. And William can't come with her. This is in 1651 because he can't go back to England. He's in exile. The government at the time would have imprisoned him and possibly executed him. So she goes back with William's brother called Charles and like the poetry which William had written during their courtship, William starts writing poetry again when Margaret's away. And it starts off with lots of images of how much he misses her, how different his life is,

how he's like a calm storm. Now there's now that the passion of Margaret there. And these poems get more and more odd. He starts describing how servants have turned spies and how Margaret has betrayed him and how she's like turned cold against him. There's a chance. There's a chance. There is a chance that Margaret had betrayed him with his brother. Ah, right. Because she writes some really quite brilliantly odd prefaces to her work after Charles dies, describing her love for him, which just seem incredibly intense. But it's so hard to know. It's so hard to know. And it's very hard to take biographical detail from poetry, and it's hard to know whether the betrayal was just emotional or if it was sexual. But there's definitely a

hint of, yeah, spiritual sex. There's definitely a hint of a kind of betrayal, which is often, which is not something that's really discussed with Margaret, because a lot of what people do know about her and what has been remembered for her is how much is like the kind of crazy love story between her and her husband and how there there's a 17th century love match and one of the few works of hers that stayed in print after her death was her biography of her husband. So people have always kind of privileged the idea of her. as a dutiful wife. A lot of the history written about her will say that she's

mad, but she was a great wife. When I was just reading more and doing research and reading all of these poems, you start to think maybe actually the relationship was far more fraught than we might have thought. And in the 1660s, when they're back in Nottinghamshire, which is where William's country has as well

back in Bolsover, there is even a plot to try and convince him that his wife has cheated on her and that he's a cockold, but he doesn't believe it. And it does seem like it probably was a false plot. So accusations of infidelity do swirl around to the point where when she dies, there's a really rude poem written about her, which is anonymous, where they call her Welbeck's illustrious whore. Oh. Great line as well. That is a good line now. They never had any babies, did they? They didn't, like there were no kids from that marriage. Yeah. So when she was writing her

autobiography, Margaret describes how she thought William wanted to marry her in order to have more heirs. And And then she writes this really heartbreaking line, which is like, I couldn't have any children, but William never loved me any of the less for that, which is so sad because it kind of implies that it would have been expected that he would have loved her less. And so, no, there are no children, but instead, Margaret writes all of these brilliant prefaces where she kind of describes her books as her babies. They're her newborn fancies. In one preface, she describes how her printer has been a bad midwife and lamed her baby by not correcting her spelling. I love that. I love it too. She also says it's against nature for a woman to spell right,

which I think is an absolutely brilliant line. Final question about this, this incredible woman. She must have been so much fun to go for a pint with. I definitely. This is a really tricky one. Is she a feminist, can we say? Because she's doing some pretty scandalous, naughty stuff. I would never suggest that going to the theatre with nipple tassels. on would render you as not a feminist. But how what do you think her legacy is? Because it's complicated to say the least.

Yeah, so it's such a good question. So she writes loads of work all exploring women's rights and women's role in society and she continually alleges that marriage is worse for a woman than it is for a man and that women are controlled by men or that their lives are unfair because they're expected to continually give birth. So she's writing all of these ideas which are really radical for the period,

and she's always conceiving of women as a separate group in society to men in a society which is geared towards men. So that is clearly a very early beginnings of feminist thought of the type that we often associate with coming a century later with the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft, but at the same point she's a royalist and how do you reconcile her belief in the natural order of society with her belief that women are unfairly treated in that society. So it was something I really struggled with, and I kind of came to the conclusion that,

we can see her as a very early feminist who wrote a lot of these feminist ideas who really set out key ideas in feminist thought but that we shouldn't expect her to be perfect or to match our own ideas of what feminism is now. Francesca, you have been marvellous to talk to you. I have so much enjoyed talking to you about this woman and if people want to know more about you and Margaret Cavendish,

where can they find you? Yes, so my biography of Margaret Cavendish came out just last month and it's called Pure Witt, the revolutionary life of Margaret Cavendish. And yeah, you can find it anywhere. And I'm on Instagram and Twitter at Chaska Peacock. Thank you so much for talking to us today.

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