Roaring Girls. Holly Kyte

tutor, and she his scholar, she admitted, but she had never received professional teaching from any ‘proper’ philosophers. The need to defend herself and her work would seemingly never end.

      The year 1654 had been a bad one from the start: in February, the Cavendishes had received the news from England that Sir Charles had died, weakened by the fever he had caught the year before, and the effect was crushing. William had lost his brother, and Margaret a close friend, but both had lost the man they viewed as their saviour – Sir Charles had consistently lent them money and support, rescued the family estates from the Parliamentarians, even kept them from starvation. Margaret would later refer to him as ‘the preserver of my life’.[54] They owed him everything, and his loss plunged the couple into melancholy and illness.

      Work was Margaret’s medicine this time, and despite the setbacks, her intellectual life was burgeoning. Friendships with scholarly types such as Constantijn Huygens allowed her to discuss her ever-expanding reading and the experiments she conducted in her laboratory, and to test her theories against other minds besides her husband’s, while every spare minute was spent writing it all down.

      Her next book, Philosophical and Physical Opinions, published in 1655, expanded on earlier ideas, offering an exhaustive theory of the natural world and all its phenomena, and her prefaces and addresses reflected this growing seriousness. She dedicated the work to Oxford and Cambridge, the universities she aspired to attend but was categorically excluded from.

      The publication of The World’s Olio the previous year had provoked yet more tiresome accusations that the work could not possibly be all hers, prompting Margaret to include in her prefaces increasingly irritable repudiations of the charges levelled at her by this ‘ill-natured and unbelieving age’. She was repeating herself to no effect – a woman’s word was worthless; the accusations only ceased when William weighed in on the debate in an epistle he contributed to Philosophical and Physical Opinions. It was plain to him that base prejudice was behind it all – ‘Here’s the crime,’ he stated, ‘a lady writes them, and to entrench so much upon the male prerogative is not to be forgiven’ – and at long last, Margaret was beginning to understand this too.[55] As she grew weary of the battles to gain respect and recognition for her work, her own belief in what women could achieve, and what society said they could achieve, were becoming increasingly polarised.

      In her dedication to the ‘Two Universities’, she forcefully argued her new stance, asking them to accept her work ‘without a scorn, for the good encouragement of our sex, lest in time we should grow irrational as idiots’. She spoke from bitter experience when she wrote that men thought it impossible for women to acquire learning, ‘and we out of a custom of dejectedness think so too, which makes us quit all industry towards profitable knowledge’. But as her confidence in her own abilities had grown, so too had her conviction that women had ‘rational souls as well as men’, and that it was their exclusion from intellectual, civic and political life that was the source of the problem; it left women to become ‘like worms, that only live in the dull earth of ignorance … for we are kept like birds in cages, to hop up and down in our houses, not suffered to fly abroad’. Without the experience and knowledge that men had access to, it was no wonder women lacked their ‘invention’. How could they thrive when ‘we are never employed either in civil or martial affairs, our counsels are despised, and laughed at’ and ‘the best of our actions are trodden down with scorn’? And all because of ‘the over-weaning conceit men have of themselves’ and their ‘despisement of us’.[56] Well, she’d realised her mistake and found her outrage. There was no natural inferiority in women; only prejudice against them. Margaret Cavendish the proto-feminist had been born.

      VIRGIN VIRAGOS

      Never one to pause for breath, Margaret plunged into her next book with a newfound confidence in both herself and in women. Nature’s Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life, published in the summer of 1656, was another overwhelmingly diverse treasure chest of poems, fireside tales, animal fables, social satires and dialogues that attempted to pack in all of everyday life experience. It was her most ambitious, accomplished and visionary work yet, and the stand-out prose pieces all, in their way, offered revolutionary depictions of women.

      In ‘The Matrimonial Agreement’, a woman’s powerlessness in marriage is redressed when a sceptical bride strikes a bargain with her husband: if she suspects him of adultery, she has the right to leave him and take a share of his estate with her. In ‘Ambition Preferr’ed Before Love’ the lady chooses not to marry at all, because ‘Husbands will never suffer their wives to climb [Fame’s Tower], but keep them fast lock’d in their arms, or tie them to household employments.’ And in ‘The Contract’, a morality tale in the ‘romancical’ mould, scholarly women are unashamedly celebrated in the spurned heroine who wins back her betrothed by becoming a paragon of learning and a ‘meteor of the time’.

      ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ is Nature’s Pictures’ most interesting fictional offering, though – an allegorical, romance-inflected romp that illustrates the sexual hazards to which women are perpetually exposed. Featuring a gun-toting, cross-dressing, self-educated, gender-fluid heroine who finds herself shipwrecked in fantastical lands and winds up fending off a predatory Prince, outwitting some dangerous cannibals, leading an army into battle in defence of a Queen, making said Queen fall in love with her and ruling her own kingdom, it’s pretty startling stuff for its time.[57] Too timid to fire a pistol herself, Margaret was living out all her heroic fantasies by putting one in the unwavering hand of her heroine – and as the Prince advances on her with a smile, thinking it ‘a shame to be out-dared by a woman’, she shoots him without compunction. Later, when the Queen discovers her crush is a woman, Margaret even dabbles with the possibility of same-sex love – the Queen is ‘angry that she was deceived, yet still did love’. Pushing the boundaries further still, she toys with the fantasy of same-sex marriage, as the Queen concludes that ‘since I cannot marry her, and so make her my husband, I will keep her if I can, and so make her my friend’. The heroine’s revelation to her troops, meanwhile, is met with undiluted approbation and a rousing cry for equality: ‘Heaven bless you, of what sex soever you be’.

      The last word, however, sadly goes to convention as the ending plucks our heroine from her boys’ clothes and puts her in a wedding dress, as the wife of her would-be rapist. It’s disconcerting to say the least, but as a woman who flirted with the tropes of masculinity herself, Margaret knew not to push the transgressive image of the warrior woman too far. Amazonian ‘virgin viragos’ had traditionally signalled social disorder and disruption – dangerous, unnatural women who rejected their femininity and threatened to throw the established order of marriage and childbearing into chaos – but Margaret had flipped the idea on its head by using her weaponised virgin not to wreak havoc, but to bring about peace and social order.[58] Behind the smokescreen of the traditional marriage plot, she could argue the subtly radical notion that breaking with prescribed gender conventions might suggest impeccable virtue in women rather than immodesty, and that masculine get-up could be a kind of armour that afforded them empowerment, freedom and safety.

      These tales are significant in portraying some of the earliest fictional heroines written by a woman in English, and it’s heartening that in their intelligence, resourcefulness and courage they flouted all the tired rules of femininity and achieved a level of agency that their female audience could only dream of. And Margaret undoubtedly did dream of this stuff. She didn’t fantasise about heroes who would come along to rescue her; she fantasised about being a heroic woman who could rescue herself. With so many autobiographical details filtering into these tales – perilous voyages from home, exile in a foreign land, men whose first wives are conveniently dispatched and whose libertinism is reformed by the love of a virtuous young woman – it’s clear that Margaret was rewriting her own life as a