The Blazing World is a testament to how far the written novel has travelled in the past 400 years. A literary time capsule, ...

Who’s afraid of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle? Virginia Woolf was. In “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf compared Cavendish, a 17th-century philosopher, poet and scientist, to a giant cucumber ...

“Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” the most famous rhetorical question in English, is now retired upon finding an answer: Francesca Peacock. Woolf’s name and words appear often enough in Pure Wit as ...

Journalist Peacock debuts with an excellent biography of 17th-century English author and “proto-feminist” Margaret Cavendish (née Lucas). Born in 1623, Margaret grew up in a wealthy family whose ...

Duchess Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673), from her high social position, dabbled in fiction, poetry, drama and philosophical writing. Learned societies and science groups existed and caught her vivid ...

*And here comes speculative world number one, "the Regular World," a Duchess Margaret Cavendish sci-fi utopia, where every aspect of existence is neatly regulated, and therefore as good as it is ...

Alex von Tunzelmann meets Professor Keith Allen to discuss Margaret Cavendish’s remarkable legacy. Keith, who is professor of philosophy at the University of York, has been researching Margaret ...

Rebellious, ambitious and outspoken, Margaret Cavendish is often said to be the first feminist scientist. In book after book, she railed against the constraints that restricted women’s lives. Even so, ...

Realist historical fictions, with the rustling demands of their costumes and their period-appropriate speech, often depend on painstakingly described physical veracity, sensory believability, to steep ...