To Virginia Woolf, she was “a giant cucumber” choking the roses and carnations in an otherwise orderly garden of seventeenth-century literature. Several of her contemporaries felt similarly. Samuel Pepys found her “dress so antick, and her deportment so ordinary, that I do not like her at all.” Dorothy Osborne said of her that “there were many soberer People in Bedlam,” while Mary Evelyn was “surprised to find so much extravagancy and vanity in any person not confined within four walls.”

This was the Margaret Cavendish I first encountered, through Woolf’s exquisitely savage portrait in The Common Reader:

Nevertheless, though her philosophies are futile, and her plays intolerable, and her verses mainly dull, the vast bulk of the Duchess is leavened by a vein of authentic fire. One cannot help following the lure of her erratic and lovable personality as it meanders and twinkles through page after page. There is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted, about her. Her simplicity is so open; her intelligence so active; her sympathy with fairies and animals so true and tender. She has the freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of some nonhuman creature, its heartlessness, and its charm.

And, later, in A Room of One’s Own: “What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind!”

Margaret Lucas was born in 1623 to a wealthy Essex family. After the outbreak of civil war in 1642, the royalist Lucases joined the King’s court at Oxford, where Margaret became a maid of honor to Queen Henrietta Maria, accompanying her when she fled with her court to Paris in 1644. There she met and married William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle, a royalist general thirty-one years her senior whose estates had been confiscated by Parliament. They lived in exile until the Restoration, when they returned to England and William regained his estates. He was created Duke of Newcastle in 1665.

Cavendish dined with René Descartes (Hobbes could not come) and, in 1667, was the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society (which would not admit women as members until 1945). She was, Lara Dodds writes, “the first woman to publish a collected volume of dramatic works.” Her philosophical and scientific views—regarding such matters as the lives of animals and the materiality of the mind—challenged those of the most renowned thinkers of her day. If she occasioned scandal, perhaps it was because she said w