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Indian burn feeling nipples10/13/2023 In London, everyone wanted to meet her, though they were sometimes disappointed when they did many were with Mary, the wife of the diarist John Evelyn, who thought her insane. In them, she appears part aristocrat, and part Greek statue, the suggestion being that she is an heir to the likes of Ovid and Homer.Īfter the Restoration of Charles II, the couple returned to England, and to William’s estates, and Cavendish somehow became a well-known public figure, famed as much for her eccentric appearance as for her work. ![]() So certain was she of her abilities, she commissioned an artist to create two ornate frontispieces for her books. ![]() Peacock speculates that Cavendish may have begun writing initially for money, but whatever her motivation, she was soon a published author. But for the times, they were a relatively happy, relatively equal couple, and after they moved to Antwerp, where they lived in Rubens’s house, he set about educating her (William was something of a literary patron Ben Jonson had stayed at Welbeck, his Nottinghamshire estate). The couple were not able to have children together, and William’s from his first marriage did not take to their stepmother. In London, everyone wanted to meet her, though when they did many were with Mary, the wife of the diarist John Evelyn, who thought her insane In the run-up to their marriage, William wrote her 70 adoring poems. Margaret, though, took to him, and her feelings were reciprocated. William, 30 years her senior, had a poor war record – he’d led a group of volunteers during the rout by the Parliamentarians at Marston Moor – and the fighting had left him broke. Distraction came with the arrival of William Cavendish, the Marquis of Newcastle, who would become her husband only nine months later. As Peacock tells us, the exiles could not cross their apartments without coming upon piles of excrement – courtiers and staff alike were in the habit of crouching in corners – and Margaret was soon ill with dysentery. But while she was given lodgings at the Louvre, and a country house in Saint-Germain, court life in Paris was not precisely grand. In 1644, the queen fled to France, taking her ladies with her. (The soldiers made their way to the vault below its chapel, where they cut the hair off of her mother and sister, and wore it mockingly, as makeshift wigs.) Luckily, by this point, Cavendish had already fled to Oxford, where Charles I had established his court, and where she would soon become a maid of honour to Queen Henrietta Maria. Cavendish had the misfortune (or was it?) to be born in 1623, to a family that, once the civil war was under way, soon fell foul of the Puritans during the siege of Colchester in 1648, her childhood home, St John’s Abbey, was stormed by the Parliamentary army. For all the claims that Peacock makes in Pure Wit for her subject’s writing and philosophical thinking, in the 21st century, her appeal for the non-scholar surely lies more in the life rather than in the work. Her best-known work is The Blazing World, a utopian prose piece that may be read as proto-science fiction (it’s available as a Penguin Classic). No wonder that in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf took the easy route out, dismissing Cavendish as “crack-brained and bird-witted”, a “crazy Duchess”, a “bogey to frighten clever girls with”. But who knows from where this rank ambition sprang? As even her latest biographer, Francesca Peacock, admits, it’s so hard to put the two halves of this uncommon creature together: the ill-educated girl who was practically mute with shyness, and the prolific and notorious writer who, in 1667, would become the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society (an occurrence, incidentally, that would not be repeated for a couple of centuries). In later life, Margaret Cavendish’s designs on fame make her sound like Boris Johnson: here was a woman who wanted to be an “empress and authoress of the whole world”.
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