Margaret Cavendish: Sociable Letters

253 Pages·1996·7.229 MB·English

by  James Fitzmaurice

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