For a seventeenth-century Englishwoman, Margaret (Lucas) Cavendish did the unprecedented -- she published her writing.
She lives in Yorkshire, England.. in the history of science at Cambridge, where she was awarded the Thirlwall Prize and Medal in 1997 for the best original historical research by a Cambridge scholar under thirty.
She received a Ph.
D.
About author(s): Katie Whitaker received an MA in philosophy from the University of Chicago.
Katie Whitaker draws on the extensive collection of Margaret\'s letters and legal papers to draw a vibrant and complete picture of the pioneering Mad Madge .
A lively biography and a window on the tumultuous cultural life of the seventeenth century, Mad Madge reveals there may well have been a Judith Shakespeare centuries before Virginia Woolf exhorted women to find a room of one\'s own.
Despite the scandal her writing life caused, she eventually brought out thirteen books, ranging from Poems and Fancies, the first book of poetry published by a woman under her own name, to Blazing World, the first science fiction by a woman.
In exile, she began to write and publish her poetry and essays, influenced by a Royalist cultural world that included Hobbes and Descartes.
Her extraordinary life unfolded during the English Civil Wars, when she was exiled to Paris and Antwerp as a Royalist seeking refuge from Cromwell\'s England, and later as mistress of her husband\'s estate in Newcastle after the restoration of the monarchy.
For a seventeenth-century Englishwoman, Margaret (Lucas) Cavendish did the unprecedented -- she published her writing
