Real Life Romance: Margaret and William Cavendish

In this month’s Real Life Romance, we take a look at a brilliant eccentric, Margaret Cavendish, and her husband, William Cavendish, the Duke of Newcastle. William and Margaret married for love, and by all accounts they stayed in love through years of political exile, civil war, infertility, and economic struggle. Margaret became famous for her writing, which included a variety of genres and which she (scandalously) published under her own name.

Margaret Lucas (1623 – 1673) came from a family in which marrying for love, often against parental wishes, was the norm. She was privately educated, which basically meant that she avoided her tutors and read a lot. One of the earliest ways Margaret learned to express herself artistically was through fashion. She was painfully shy yet dressed flamboyantly. Through her clothing, which was always unique, she could be an individual: “I did dislike any should follow my fashions, for I always took a delight in a singularity, even in accoutrement of habits.”

Margaret was sent to France to serve as a lady in waiting to the exiled Queen Henrietta. She hated court and begged to be sent home but her mother persuaded her to stay. She was so shy that she never talked, which made her wildly unpopular. Fortunately, she caught the eye of William Cavendish (1592 – 1676). He liked her for her shyness, and they corresponded a great deal. While Margaret did not like to talk in public, she had no problem expressing herself in the written word, and neither did he. As the courtship advanced the letters grew rather racy on William’s side. William, a widow, was much older than Margaret, but this was not off-putting to her. At first she assumed their marriage would be based on friendship, but as time passed she developed a passion for him that reciprocated his passion for her.

It’s a good thing Margaret and William had such an attachment to each other, because they had a lot of challenges in their married life. Margaret struggled with ill health and kept taking the kinds of treatments from doctors that today make us say “Um…no.” They were unable to conceive a baby, which led to more horrible treatments. They spent much of their married lives in exile because getting hitched in the middle of a civil war is not conducive to a calm domestic life, and they lost most of their money (the fact that they lived opulently didn’t help their debt issues much).

However, the Cavendishes excelled as a creative team. William steadfastly encouraged his wife to write and, in what was unthinkable for a woman of her social position at the time, to publish her writing, for money, under her own name. Here’s some context, from Mad Madge by Katie Whitaker, who points out that even upper-class men did not publish under their own names:

For women of this class the dishonor of publishing was further multiplied by moral considerations. Modesty, silence, obedience, self- effacement – the central concepts of female virtue – would all be violated by publication, and women who printed their works risked shame and denunciation.

Whitaker goes on to point out that in the 1650s a number of books were published by women, but they were all by women of lower social classes than Margaret:

Of literary works by upper-class women, only nine had appeared in print in the last fifty years, all but one of them published without their authors’ permission, and the one exception had ended in disaster.

Margaret wrote a biography of her husband, an autobiography, non-fiction works about philosophy and the science of the day, plays, moral stories for children, and satires. Her book The Blazing World is often considered the first science fiction novel. She was considered eccentric, and later generations thought she may have been insane, but her work was popular even when she was not. Many of her intellectual peers praised her lavishly and publicly and while some vilified her, others saw her as a literary heroine.

Initially, Margaret considered William to be her teacher. Ultimately, they both considered her to be his intellectual equal. At the time, women sometimes had short poems or pieces of prose included in longer works by their male relatives. Margaret and William flipped this tradition, with Margaret writing the longer works (although William also wrote some full-length work including a famous book on horsemanship) and William contributing short pieces. Whitaker quotes Margaret as saying:

Our wits join in matrimony, my Lord’s the masculine, mine the feminine wit…we are married, soul, bodies, and brains, which is a treble marriage, united in one love, which I hope is not the power of death to dissolve.

William outlived Margaret by several years before dying of illness. Margaret died suddenly of unknown causes. She left behind one of my favorite quotes (from A Burning World):

I am not Covetous, but as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be; which is the cause, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet I will endeavor to be, Margaret the First: and though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Caesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own.

My source for this post (and all quotes within it) is the marvelous biography Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by her Pen, by Katie Whitaker. I highly recommend it. This post attempts to boil Margaret and William’s story to the bare essence (they were in love and she wrote stuff). Whitaker’s book is much more detailed and juicy, delving into the family backgrounds of Margaret and William and revealing all kinds of details about seventeenth century life including but not limited to: bizarre medical treatments, elopements, a scandalous overuse of ribbons, illegitimate children, family squabbles, sea voyages, political intrigue, and the public baring of bosoms. It’s a fascinating portrait of dramatic people who lived in a dramatic time.