“A perfect dagger of a book”

-Jonny Diamond,  Literary Hub ” Margaret the First is set in the seventeenth century, but don’t let that fool you. It’s a strikingly smart   and daringly feminist novel with modern insights into love, marriage, and the siren call of ambition.”   —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation ” What a vision of loneliness […]

-Jonny Diamond, 

Literary Hub

”
Margaret the First
is set in the seventeenth century, but don’t let that fool you. It’s a strikingly smart  

and daringly feminist novel with modern insights into love, marriage, and the siren call of ambition.”


 

—Jenny Offill, author of
Dept. of Speculation

”



What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind! As if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.”
– Virginia Woolf,
A Room of One’s Own

Margaret the First
 

dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional 17th-century Duchess. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when“being a writer” was not supposed to be an option 

 for a woman

. Her work earned her both fame and infamy in England: at the dawn of daily newspapers, she was “Mad Madge,” an original tabloid celebrity. Yet Margaret was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of London—a mainstay of the Scientific Revolution—and the last for another two hundred years.

“A mad, conceited, ridiculous woman.”

–

 Samuel Pepys, 

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

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