MA R G A R ET CAVENDISH GARLAND REFERENCE LIBRARY OF THE HUMANITIES VOLUME 2009 MARGARET CAVENDISH SOCIABLE LETTERS EDITED BY JAMES FITZMAURICE First published by Garland Publishing, Inc. This edition published 2012 by Routledge Routledge Routledge Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group 711 Third Avenue 2 Park Square, Milton Park New York, NY 10017 Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Copyright © 1997 by James Fitzmaurice All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of, 1624?-1674 Margaret Cavendish: sociable letters / edited with an introduction and notes by James Fitzmaurice. p. cm. - (Garland reference library of the humanities; vol. 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 0-8153-2451-0 (alk. paper) 1. Women-Conduct of life-Fiction. 2. Epistolary fiction, English. 3. Character sketches. 4. English letters. I. Fitzmaurice, James, 1943- . II. Title. III. Title: Sociable letters. IV. Series. PR360S.N2S63 1997 823' .4-dc20 96-20565 CIP Cover illustration detail from an etching of Margaret Cavendish printed with the kind permission of the Fellows and Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University. For Keith, Anne, and Stephen, as well as Rosie, and for Susan Contents Preface ix Introduction xi Bibliography xxiii Sociable Letters 3 PREFACE I have worked off an on with Margaret Cavendish for the last ten years. My first impression was that Sociable Letters was her best book and I continue to be inclined towards that view. I also have come to enjoy others of her volumes, particularly the 1668 Plays and Natures Pictures. I return again and again to her life, as this edition will show, and I am convinced that a great deal of work remains to be done on it as well as with what she has written. I am happy that my general views of the worth of Cavendish are shared more and more widely, especially by those who have been able to attend the annual conferences on Cavendish that so far have been restricted to England. The frontispiece is from the first edition. The printer's decoration is placed for the convenience of the present edition. The cover illustration comes from an etching owned by Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and is printed with the kind permission of the Master and Fellows. The copy text is the 1664 edition,. Cavendish took special interest in this book and she appears to have ordered carefully executed hand-made corrections in many presentation copies. These corrections are also found in the errata sheet, which may have been prepared by Cavendish herself. At least one change is more like a revision than a correction. See note 81. There are many people to thank for help in the preparation of this volume. I will begin with posthumous appreciation for Rhodes Dunlap, who always saw the worth of sound scholarship. Likewise posthumous credit must go to Lowry Nelson who often pointed me in the right direction. Margie Ferguson early on tipped me off to such then-obscure writers as Elizabeth Cary. Sara Jayne Steen, Josephine Roberts, Nancy Gutierrez, Mary Ann O'Donnell, Gene Cunnar, and Carol Barash all have offered examples of what can be accomplished with fresh readings of early women authors. Margaret Ezell reminded me of the usefulness of bibliography and paleography when we were both at the Huntington Library. The staff of the Huntington frequently was able to help with my many questions posed to them over a series of summers. Other readers at the Huntington as well as research associates proved to be invaluable sources of information. I especially appreciated conversations I had with Stephen May, John Steadman, Dan and Elizabeth Donno, as well as Paul Hardacre. I also owe debts to Paul Hartle, who helped with questions regarding the university and college libraries at Cambridge, and to Douglas Gray, who assisted in a similar way with Oxford. Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, provided me with a visiting research fellowship and a pleasant atmosphere in which to work. Thanks must go to the Bilby Research Center at Northern Arizona University for photographs connected with this volume. The Organized Research Committee at Northern Arizona University provided financial support for summers spent gathering material, some of which has only now come to fruition. Sarah Hillyer transcribed the vast bulk of the letters. Susan Wright, most of all, offered advice, read parts of the manuscript, and gave encouragement. INTRODUCTION CAVENDISH: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE Over the last three hundred and fifty years, Margaret Cavendish and her writing have elicited a variety of reactions. In a letter composed in response to a personal encounter with Cavendish, Mary Evelyn, wife to the famous diarist, was unimpressed. Cavendish was "rambling as her books, aiming at science, difficulties, high notions, terminating commonly in nonsense, oaths, and obscenity."1 During the seventeenth century more generally, Cavendish was sometimes offered fulsome praise, as may be seen by the volume of letters by various hands and compiled by her husband after her death,2 and she was frequently issued gratuitous insults.3 The eighteenth century brought an end to insult but tended to trivialize and sentimentalize both the woman and the writing. Frederick Rowton is typical of the century in choosing to select poems that characterize the author as pensive and given to writing delicate verses about Queen Mab and the fairy folk.4 Cavendish did, indeed, write about her melancholic moods and Mab, but she also composed racy plays not altogether unlike what was performed on the Restoration stage. The earlier decades of the nineteenth century saw little change in her reputation. For Charles Lamb, Cavendish was "the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous, - but again somewhat fantastical, and original-brain'd, generous Margaret Newcastle."5 Later in the century, however, her biography of her husband, long taken seriously by Civil War historians but rarely acknowledged, was suddenly made generally available to the reading public. Accordingly, she came to be viewed less as a poet and more as someone who provided accurate information about the upper classes in the seventeenth century. Virginia Woolf cast Cavendish as a pampered aristocrat, a writer with no literary self-control. Although Woolf gave credit to Cavendish for "passion for poetry," her final, and much quoted, judgment of Cavendish was as a "giant cucumber [that] spread itself over all the roses."6 Although many scholars and critics today would agree with Woolf's view that Cavendish lacked discipline and many would add that she was driven to quirky writing by the patriarchal structures of the seventeenth century, in the last few years Cavendish has come to be appreciated as a writer of some merit. Her play The Female Wits was successfully produced in London in 1995, and her work of Utopian science fiction, The Blazing World, is currently receiving considerable attention. Her scientific thought provides puzzles for those who study early natural philosophy, and certain portions of her fiction, "The Contract" and "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity," from Natures Pictures are widely read. Much of this interest derives from what has been called 1Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, ed. William Bray, 1857, vol. 4, pp. 8 and 9. 2 Letters and Poems in Honour of the Incomparable Princess, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, London; 1676. 3 In an anonymous lampoon she is dismissed as "Welbeck's illustrious whore" (Grant, 199). 4 Female Poets of Great Britain , pp. 79 - 82. 5Essays of Elia, p. 89. 6A Room of One's Own , p. 65. "archeological" work with early women writers; that is, a commitment by a good many scholars to the rereading and even rescuing of authors long dismissed as having little importance. There is also an increased general concern with early fiction that has begun to surface with books like Paul Hunter's Before Novels. Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, and Eliza Haywood as well as Cavendish consequently are all receiving renewed attention as writers of narrative. Sociable Letters B.G. MacCarthy traces the development of character in eighteenth- century fiction back to Sociable Letters and to seventeenth-century character writers like Hall and Overbury. Sociable Letters is in addition very much a collection of letters and is probably based on actual letter writing as practiced by women. Indeed, Cavendish in her preface to her reader specifically rejects the model of artificial composition, although on rare occasions she may be guilty of some of the same manipulations as practiced by her predecessor James Howell. Howell rewrote a number of genuine letters prior to publication so as to make his understanding of historical events more prescient than was the case (see Sociable Letters, letter 165). At the same time, quite a few of the letters composed by Cavendish are less recognizable as epistolary efforts and more readily describable as essays in the tradition of Bacon and Montaigne. Cavendish often classifies and subdivides, so that we sometimes find men sorted into their various categories (e.g., letter 33). The topics of these essays include marriage, medicine, war and peace, science, as well as English and classical literatures. The strength of the book is to be found less in any particular genre or topic, however. Rather, the ever-present observations about life as it was lived in the seventeenth century give the volume its strength. A little spice is added to the mix when one realizes that some, but by no means all, of the characters were actual people more or less carefully hidden behind initials and anagrams. Readers of the time were invited, as it were, to find the key for who was who. The situation is complicated by the fact that Cavendish sometimes pokes fun at herself under cover of the initials of her maiden name, Margaret Lucas, and often puts ideas she holds herself into the speeches of her interlocutors. There are, finally, letters that are probably not fictional, letters written to living persons who are mostly friends and family. The organizing principle of the book is variety, as was the case with The Worlds Olio (1655). An "olio" was a mixed bowl of fruit and so, after a fashion, is Sociable Letters. Cavendish alternates long letters with short ones and tries to avoid grouping letters by topic. In her preface to her readers, she says that she had considered writing another book of plays but chose not to do so in order to offer them a change of pace. She goes on to suggest that her letters are like scenes from a play, scenes that may be mixed up for the sake of variety and that are not bound by constraints of plot. Her plan, then, is not unlike what we find executed by Robert Herrick in Hesperides (1648). For the most part she carries through with her intentions as stated, although some of her letters on the subject of Antwerp are clustered at the end of the book as are the missives to her actual friends and family. xii Marriage The single most important topic in Sociable Letters, be it subject to the analysis of a formal essay or embedded in the theme of a brief narrative, is marriage. Should one, and women in particular, marry at all? What are the motivations for marriage? How does one deal with the physical attraction attendant upon youth? What about money and social status? How do children fit within a marriage? Who is dishonored by adultery and who suffers in what ways? What danger is there from mistresses and what are the consequences of divorce? Cavendish always praises her husband and pronounces herself fortunate in her marriage, but in Sociable Letters and elsewhere she is deeply dubious of the benefits of the institution for women. In a play within the play The Convent of Pleasure (1668), we learn that men often beat their wives, that childbirth sometimes involves the death of the mother, and that children are frequently ingrates. Early in Sociable Letters (letter four), we find three sisters who declare they will not marry. The variety of their complexions as well as the differences in their temperaments mark them as representatives for all womankind, and the intent of the letter seems to be a refutation of the old argument that women must marry before they lose their ability to attract men. "Time wears out youth and fades beauty," says the critic of the three young women. They respond that they need not be beautiful if they can be wise. This position is quite probably what was accepted by Cavendish, but she avoids being preachy by offering a general critique of women, "When our sex cannot pretend to be fair, they will pretend to be wise." Feminists have been disconcerted by apparent antifeminism of the sort found here, but Cavendish rarely makes a point without some sort of irony involved. She is seldom direct and often oblique. Letter 32 tells the stories of two married women, one patient and one a shrew. Since the Griselda-like woman shows fortitude as well as forbearance and since the Kate-like woman precipitates a "hurly burly" that involves she and her husband throwing whatever is handy at each other in the midst of a dinner party, we may be tempted to believe that Cavendish takes the traditional view of what is proper behavior in women. Men may be crude or selfish; women must make up for these weaknesses. The story, however, is less a moral fable and more a matter of slapstick comedy. Indeed, the letter writer is dismissive of the "virtuous" lady in her closing, "leaving the Angelick Lady to be a Pattern to her Sex, I rest, Madam, Your Faithful Fr. & S." Cavendish is in no hurry to endorse such weak-willed submission. As the book comes to a close, she is, for a change, very direct in describing for her sister Ann the dangers of marriage and the safety of a single life (letter 201). Should any of us have missed her point, Cavendish at last gives us an unequivocal statement. If one does decide to marry, then the choice that Cavendish sees made by most of her contemporaries is between the physical attractiveness of youth and the financial gain attendant upon age. The old are foolish to marry for beauty and the young merely reap benefits that will be thrown away when they, themselves, become old (letter 39). Many desire marriage and therefore frequent "Hymen's markets," which include "Churches, Plays, Balls, Masks" (letter 50). While Cavendish may seem cynical about the ways in which women and men chose spouses during the seventeenth century, she really is more amused than appalled. If anything, she is more understanding of the xiii