About FDU Press

It has taken more than 300 years, but the work of Margaret Cavendish has finally become part of “the canon.” This unusually fine collection offers an overview of her enormous and diverse production through the lens of genre, the dominant frame within which most early-modern writers created. This was especially true of Cavendish since, as Cottegnies (Univ. of Paris) and Weitz (Oxford) explain, her extraordinary ambition was to be a “complete author,” working within both “literary” forms such as satire, romance, and drama (part 2 of this collection) but also in “non-fictional” forms (part 1)—the philosophical letter, biography, the treatise. The contributors to this volume see Cavendish’s distinctly idiosyncratic use of genre as a sign of originality, transgression, or feminist critique—an adulatory emphasis that occasionally seems like special pleading, but that may not be a bad thing at this point in Cavendish scholarship. Unusual for a collection by various hands, this one has no duds, and some contributions are exceptional. Hero Chalmers’ on Cavendish’s “poetics of variety,” Sara Hutton’s on the indebtedness of Blazing World to Lucian, and Sara Mendelson’s on autobiography in the plays, to choose just three examples, will not soon be bettered. Summing up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through researchers and faculty.