Margaret Cavendish

“Virginia Woolf famously described Margaret Cavendish as a cucumber choking the roses. To my mind, Cavendish is the whole garden, prickly and wild and fresh. With no formal education, her fierce and elemental imagination tuned itself to atoms and rabbits, trees and invisible worlds—it vibrates across these pages.” —Danielle Dutton, author of Margaret the First: A Novel


“Margaret Cavendish clearly established herself as an alternative voice of sceptical wit and humane enquiry, unique among seventeenth-century women, and prophesying many others. There is something magnificent about her irrepressible eccentricity. In her own fashion she survived a social revolution, and bore witness to a scientific one.” —Richard Holmes