Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton

Rumors swirled. Servants talk, of course. The floorboards creaked as I paced and spoke alone. The hallway went sharp with the scent of burning ink. Did I cook up incantations? They sounded half afraid. Pacing, yes, reciting my favorite lines. My mind was elsewhere, halfway to the moon. If atoms are so small, why not worlds inside our own? A world inside a peach pit? Inside a ball of snow? And so I conjured one inside a lady's earring, where seasons pass, and life and death, without the lady's hearing.

Danielle Dutton's Margaret the First is a biographical novel about Margaret Cavendish, a 17th century polymath and author who was the first woman permitted to speak before the Royal Society of London. Cavendish's The Blazing World is often considered one of the first works of science fiction, and she published several natural philosophy books that were admired and condemned--largely because she was a woman--in equal measure. She was famous for her eccentric outfits and what was perceived as strange behavior; diarist Samuel Pepys noted that obsessed crowds called her "Mad Madge."

How does one become "Mad Madge?" In Dutton's novel, Margaret's character is produced by several species of exile: a literal exile on the continent for Margaret and her husband William Cavendish, a royalist, during Cromwell's Protectorate, and a figurative exile from the company of learned men like Robert Boyle, Christian Huygens, and Robert Hooke, whose scientific and philosophical debates Margaret longs to enter. Margaret has a sensitive mind and a powerful imagination; as a child she dreams of "Bubble-worlds" filled with "Bubble-people" who "fell in love, bore children, and died, their bodies decomposing into a fine foamy substance that was then reintegrated into the foamy infrastructure of the world as the Bubble-children grew up and bore children of their own and died and were integrated into the sky and air and water." It's the fantasy of a child who wants the world to be livelier, more fantastic, than it really is; is it any wonder that the adult Margaret, expelled from home and locked out of the world of men, still relies on these fantasy worlds?

You can imagine a version of this book written in a simulacrum of Margaret's voice, with its winding 17th century sentences and non-standard spelling, but what Dutton does here, I think, is find a modern analog that perfectly captures the perspective of a brilliant, disaffected woman: sharp short sentences, flitting from one thought to the next, and intensely metaphorical. Margaret wears a hat, for instance, "like petals falling through empty space." It allows her, too, to move effortlessly at the book's halfway point from the first-person point of view to the third, as if Margaret's mind itself becomes a thing enclosed, an exiled world.

Dutton manages to puncture the "Mad Madge" myth: yes, Margaret can be unusual, as when she attaches a pair of black velvet stars to her face, but it's easy to see how these "eccentricities" develop from a sense of placelessness. (To make things worse, Margaret and William are unable to have children, robbing Margaret of the one socially sanctioned identity that might be left to her.) But Restoration society, like our own, is not kind to women who stand out. Despising Margaret is an activity that cuts through class lines, from the Queen, enraged at Margaret's audacity to show up to a ball with a dress with a train, to the crowds that scream "Mad Madge." But a select few, like Huygens and a portion at least of the Royal Society, are able to see Margaret for the brilliance of her imagination and the power of her ideas. As Margaret writes in the prologue to The Blazing World, if her writing has satisfied any reader, "I shall count myself a Happy Creatoress; if not, I must be content to live a melancholly Life."