This is a decidedly odd, wildly imaginative book — you can get it free from Project Gutenberg. The “Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princesse, the Duchess of Newcastle”, may be (slightly) better known as the poet Margaret Cavendish*. (Admire the three long esses in that author name.) The Blazing World is a crazy sci-fi romp, in which the author herself appears as a character.

OpenCulture invites us to “Read Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World: the first sci-fi novel written by a woman”. (Link via Shelf Awareness for Readers.) Their post comes with this video from The Great Books Prof.

If you don’t see a video here, please click on the title of this post in order to view it in your browser. It is quite interesting.

In the book a woman is kidnapped and transported on a ship which gets blown off course up to the North Pole. The pirates freeze to death; she being sustained by the “light of her beauty” and the “heat of her youth”. At the Pole they come upon a sort of elevator system which pulls her and the ship up into another world up above them. Here our heroine quickly becomes Empress of the Blazing World, as the new planet is named. She uses her position of authority to discover the scientific facts about this and her original world, interrogating the Bird Men, the Ant Men, the Worm Men, etc. each of which groups has expertise in a different science. Eventually she declares that she wants to write a new Cabbala, and is advised by her spirit advisors that the best person to help her in this task is the Duchess of Newcastle, who thereupon becomes a character in her own novel. The book ends with the reconquest of the women’s native country (ESFI — England, Scotland, France, Ireland) back in the “real world” and they arrange for power to be returned to EFSI’s rightful King. (Remember the Duchess was writing at a time of civil war.) In a final address to the reader the author regrets her inability to match the deeds of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and proposes the creation of The Blazing World as her world conquest.

A member of a Royalist family, Margaret Lucas (1623 – 73) became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria wife of King Charles I. In 1644 she left England with the Queen, and lived for a time at the court of the young King Louis XIV. There she met and married her husband William Cavendish in 1645. As well as her surprisingly modern poetry she wrote six respectable works of natural philosophy, as well as a number of plays and a biography of her husband. While she may not have been a great scientist, she was, be it emphasized, a woman, with all the contemporary disadvantages that implies, and was the first person in Britain to develop an original theory of atomism. Samuel Pepys called her “a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman”. John Evelyn on the other hand saw her as “a mighty pretender† to learning, poetry, and philosophy”. She was the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society. Virginia Woolf writes of her “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 book opens with a sonnet in her praise by her husband. Cavendish was a less than brilliant general in the Civil War, and left for the continent after the defeat of the Royalists. His Dukedom was bestowed in 1665 after the restoration. He is the author of four plays as well as a manual on the training of horses. During his exile in 1640 he rented Peter Paul Rubens’ house in Antwerp, where he established a riding academy in which the art of dressage was invented and perfected. Ulrich Raulff (in Farewell to the the Horse, Liveright, 2018) opines that no desecration of Rubens’ memory occurred; all that was taking place was “simply one Baroque art form being replaced by another: a ballet danced by beautiful horses” rather than by the naked ladies disporting across Rubens’ canvasses.

Lord Cavendish with His Wife Margaret in the Garden of Rubens in Antwerp (1662) by Gonzales Coques. Photo: Wikipedia

The Blazing World was published in 1666. The picture at the top shows the 1668 reprint. 1611 is alleged to be the composition date of the first draft of the first real sci fi book, Somnium by Johannes Kepler. This was a sort of dream diary, and includes descriptions of what art looks like when viewed from the moon. Margaret Cavendish’s book focusses primarily on explaining the sciences, which she treats as identical in her imaginary Blazing World to those she was so familiar with in this sublunary world. Just knowing so much about science, quite apart from her extraordinary achievement of publishing twenty-three books in a world where less than half of one percent of works were by women, would tend to guarantee her being regarded by many as crazy.

Her epitaph in Westminster Abbey says she “was a wise wittie & learned Lady, which her many Bookes do well testifie”.

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* A selection of Margaret Cavendish’s poems is published by New York Review Books, at $16. This piece from Aeon discusses one of her plays in some detail — and emphasizes her feminism.

† NB: In earlier centuries “pretend” meant not what we today mean by that word; rather it meant to assert, allege, claim . . . Think “The Young Pretender”.