Margaret Lucas Cavendish Biography

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Samantha Mullins
4-23-14
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WOH2012
Margaret (Lucas) Cavendish (1623-1673)
Margaret Lucas Cavendish was born into a wealthy family located near Colchester, England. Margaret was the youngest child of eight children and was loved just as dearly as the rest. She like most her siblings took on education with a governess and learned what they needed to get by in the world. Unlike her other siblings Margaret showed signs of admiration towards reading and writing, but more towards her writings. While in her youth she managed to write sixteen of what she called her “Baby Books”, the shortest of which consisted of 50-75 pages of written work. It was at this point that she found her passion for the written word.
The members of Margaret’s family were always devoted to the royalist court and even moved from Colchester to Oxford when the civil war threatened England’s doorstep. When the war became too much for the royal court in Oxford they fled even further into France. Margret being very close friends with Queen Henrietta Maria, followed close behind her leaving her family behind her as she too moved to France. Margaret used this tragic flee in some of her writings, she uses it as a “recurring romance motif in her books, where a lady flees to unknown lands and endures many mishaps.”(Cooley, Ron. 1998) While in France Margaret first met her future husband William Cavendish, the first Duke of Newcastle and soon married in 1645. It was during that time that Margaret first learned about science and philosophy from both her husband and her brother in-law Sir Charles Cavendish. “Because William Cavendish was a known patron, officiating over a renowned literary and scientific salon, her marriage also introduced her to a world of political, ...

... middle of paper ...

...fe works are still available today to those in search of her writings. Though I didn’t know much about her before now, I find her story and findings one of great interest to me and look forward to learning more and more about her in the near future and hopefully help to educate others on her views and findings much as she had in her time.

Works Cited

http://www.epigenesys.eu/en/science-and-you/women-in-science/651-lady-margaret-cavendish

http://www.women-philosophers.com/Margaret-Cavendish.html

http://jannainspa.blogspot.com/2005/10/margaret-cavendish.html

Cooley, Ron and Brecken Hancock, Kristen Kenyon, Annette
Lapointe, Joan Morrison, Barbara Palmer, and Lawrene Toews.
As One Phoenix: Four Seventeenth Century Women Poets.
University of Saskatchewan, 1998.

Battigelli, A. (1998). Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind. University Press of Kentucky.

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