Review by New York Times Review
WHEN, IN THE winter of 1673, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was found dead in a garden chair, her husband lost a beloved wife and London a celebrity. It is to Danielle Dutton's credit that her novelistic take on the duchess never swells this celebrity into false intellectual brilliance. Instead, we encounter a prickly, shy, arrogant, imaginative, contradictory, curious, confused, melancholic, ambitious and restless heroine. Also childless, the attempted cures for which included syringing herbs into her womb and "a drench that would poison a horse." The duchess herself would be delighted at her resurrection in "Margaret the First," though Dutton's novel, and even the founding of the International Margaret Cavendish Society in 1997, might seem too little, too late. Above all, Cavendish coveted fame, and her fame was fleeting. Nor was it ever entirely comfortable. Sporting "black stars, white cheeks," singular fashion designs and, on one theater excursion, bare breasts, she struck the diarist Samuel Pepys as a "mad, conceited, ridiculous woman." How, then, has Dutton, author of the novel "Sprawl" and founder of Dorothy, a Publishing Project, made a sympathetic figure of "Mad Madge"? First, by writing the first half of the novel in small, diary like entries and including in them not only the future duchess's imaginings (for example, the delightful "Bubble-worlds" of "fine foamy substance") but also the horrors meted out to those on the losing side in the English Civil War: a mob beating a parson and defiling "the coffins and the corpses of our dead." Second, through unraveling the emotional jumble familiar to all ambitious, lively women, whether 17th-century aristocrats or 21st-century commoners. After Margaret deliberately upstages the opening of her devoted husband's play, she feigns innocence. Yet how she castigates herself! She is "a monster ... and hateful, after everything he's done." Further, although she enjoys her notoriety, she cringes at "the transparency of her talk." She will, she decides, "only sit and read." But "she's promised to visit her sister - so another gown, the carriage, another ride to read about in the papers the following day." What else is this but fame addiction? To those familiar with either Cavendish's own writings or Virginia Woolf's sparkling essay on her, Dutton's novel may seem more a sewing together than an entirely original work. Phrases like "tunable voices" and the intriguing "sharkly habits" are, or are inspired by, Cavendish's own words, plucked from her voluminous works. In an author's note, Dutton acknowledges her debt and also her incorporation of bits of Woolf "here and there." But while Woolf describes an "erratic and lovable personality" that "meanders and twinkles," Dutton expertly captures the pathos of a woman whose happiness is furrowed with the anxiety of underacknowledgment. Midway through the novel, Dutton makes the nimble choice to move from first-person narrator to third, neatly encapsulating Margaret's hoped-for propulsion, after her return to London at the Restoration, from the private "I" to the reported "she." The king comes to dine. Success! Though after the feast, in a lovely and moving touch, we witness Margaret looking in the glass and seeing only "the aging wife of an aged marquess, without even any children to dignify her life." Some may find it troubling that Dutton hasn't created a protofeminist. She is quite right. Cavendish was a maverick, not a role model, and her marriage, far from being an impediment, sustained her: "Frustrated, gassy, impotent, poor - we wondered together at the turning of the stars." Thus Dutton surprisingly and delightfully offers not just a remarkable duchess struggling in her duke's world but also an intriguing dissection of an unusually bountiful partnership of (almost) equals. KATHARINE GRANT'S latest book is a novel, "Sedition."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Dutton's remarkable second novel is as vividly imaginative as its subject, the 17th-century English writer and eccentric Margaret Cavendish. Even as a shy young girl, Margaret Lucas covets fame and writes prolifically. Years later, she is an attendant to the queen, and when the English Civil War begins, Margaret flees with the court to Paris, where she meets and marries the aristocratic William Cavendish. Blossoming in an intellectual milieu that includes Descartes and Dryden, she begins to write even more seriously. Back in England after the war ends, she publishes wildly unconventional books to a mixture of admiration and scorn, refusing to write anonymously like other women of her time, or to let her lack of formal education silence her. Though Dutton doesn't shy away from the "various and extravagant" antics (such as attending the theater in a topless gown) that earned her subject notoriety and the nickname "Mad Madge," her Margaret is a woman of fierce vitality, creativity, and courage. Incorporating lines from Cavendish herself as well as Virginia Woolf, whose essays introduced Dutton to Cavendish, this novel is indeed reminiscent of Woolf's Orlando in its sensuous appreciation of the world and unconventional approach to fictionalized biography. Dutton's boldness, striking prose, and skill at developing an idiosyncratic narrative should introduce her to the wider audience she deserves. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Margaret Cavendish was a 17th-century English duchess who wrote and published extensively under her own name and with the support of her husband, both a rarity for the time. A startling and original thinker, Cavendish wrote poetry, plays, scientific treatises, and early science fiction. She was witness to the antiroyalist revolution and governing regimes of Oliver Cromwell and the English monarchy, in exile and once returned to the throne. In segments titled geographically and chronologically, this loosely biographical novel takes the outline of Cavendish's life as a starting point and delves deep into her inner world. Dutton (SPRAWL) draws on Cavendish's published work to reimagine her subject's internal narrative as she evolves from a shy young lady-in-waiting to a confident author and social provocateur. Verdict Indebted to Virginia Woolf in both content and form, Dutton examines the life of a woman who upended social norms by being intelligent, imaginative, and ambitious without apology. Cavendish's intellectual and personal growth are explored with sensitivity in poetic prose style. This short literary book offers big rewards to readers interested in the complex mind of a woman ahead of her time.-Sarah Cohn, Manhattan Coll. Lib., Bronx, NY © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A slim, poetic meditation on the writing life as seen through the experiences of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, a 17th-century woman of letters.In the Author's Note, Dutton (Sprawl, 2010, etc.) thanks Virginia Woolf for introducing her to her subject: the Duchess of Newcastle appears in Woolf's essay of that name as well as in A Room of One's Own, Woolf's famous plea for women's economic and intellectual autonomy. Woolf hovers over this brief novel, audible in its cadences and visible in its cascading images of nature, artistry, and oddity. Margaret Lucas, a daughter of royalist gentry, is sent to sit out the English civil war as a lady-in-waiting to the English queen in Oxford: "I found myself in an unknown universe, whirling far into space: African servants, dogs in hats, platonic ideals, sparkling conversation, and ivy-covered quadrangles with womanizing captains, dueling earls, actors." The war heats up and the queen's court moves to Paris. Back home, offstage, most of Margaret's family members die in the war. She wins the heart of William Cavendish, 30 years her senior. He's a rich, intellectual marquess, quite the catch, but the Parliamentarians have confiscated his vast estates and fortune. The couple lives in exile in France and the Low Countries, where they hang out with scientists, poets, and philosophers (Descartes, Hobbes, Waller, Davenant), writing plays, poems, and treatises, until the Restoration reverses their fortunes (and for some reason the narration switches from first person to third). Back in England, now a duchess, Margaret gets weirder and weirder, all in carefully crafted, lyrical sentences. She offends the new queen by showing up to an audience in a dress with an extravagant train. When visitors come, she rants and recites at them. She wears a topless outfit to the theater, rouging her nipples. People follow her around, calling her Mad Madge. Most of all, though, she struggles to write. Despite its period setting and details, this novelmore poem than biographyfeels rooted in the experiences of contemporary women with artistic and intellectual ambitions. Margaret's alternating bursts of inspiration and despair about her work may feel achingly familiar to Dutton's likely readers, many of whom will probably also be aspiring writers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
