Margaret Cavendish: some links

"[The] Reason why I write in Verse, is, because I thought Errours might better passe there, then in Prose, since Poets write most Fiction, and fiction is not given for Truth, but Pastime." Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies (1653)


Significant sites:
Margaret (Lucas) Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673): a page on Anniina Jokinen's wonderful Luminarium (caveat: music plays when one opens the main page). She posts quotes, life, works (etexts to many of her works, mainly poems), essays, books (up to 2004), and more.
The Margaret Cavendish Society: includes some links and a bibliography
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcaste: contains biography, bibliography, and links to etexts

Other sites:
Margaret Cavendish Study Group: a listserv
The Margaret Cavendish page at Sunshine for Women, an good online resource for early women's writing.
Margaret Cavendish at the Women Writers Archive
Cavendish Family Papers, held at the University of Nottingham
Wikipedia entry: an active entry, recently edited

Student sites:
The page of one of my former undergraduates
The page of another of my former undergraduates
Margaret Lucas Cavendish (1623-74): from an undergrad philosophy class

Etexts: (for many more links check the above sites)
A True Relation of My Life and Breeding from the Hypatia Institute, a site dedicated to women scientists
from The Blazing World, her fantastic voyage/utopian narrative
The Atomic Poems (Women Writers Resource Project)
"A World in an Eare-Ring": nice example of Cavendish's melding of science and art
Other scientific poems

Selected Critical Works: (many more online articles available from licensed databases)
Essays from the Fifth Biennial International Margaret Cavendish Conference, Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 14 (May, 2004): full texts online
Women's Writing 4.3 (1997): Special Issue on Margaret Cavendish. Only TOC and abstracts available to non-subscribers.
In-between: Essays & Studies in Literary Criticism 9.1&2 (2000): special issue on Margaret Cavendish (TOC only)
Bertuol, Roberto. "The Square Circle of Margaret Cavendish: the 17th-century conceptualization of mind by means of mathematics." Language and Literature 10.1 (2001):21-39.
Kramer, Annette. "'Thus by the musick of a ladyes tongue': Margaret Cavendish's dramatic innovations in women's education." (PDF) Women's History Review 2.1 (March 1993):57-79.
Smith, Emily. "Genre’s 'Phantastical Garb': The Fashion of Form in Margaret Cavendish’s Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life." Early Modern Literary Studies 11.3 (January, 2006):1-40.
Suzuki, Mihoko. "Margaret Cavendish and the female satirist." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 37.3 (Summer 1997):483(18).
Wagner, Geraldine. "Romancing Multiplicity: Female Subjectivity and the Body Divisible in Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World." Early Modern Literary Studies 9.1 (May, 2003):1-59

Illustrations:
Frontispiece, Blazing World
Front page, Sociable Letters
Engraving of Margaret Cavendish by Peter van Schuppen. From the frontispiece to Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655).
Portrait

And, finally:
"[Margaret Cavendish had] an imagination that makes Salvador Dali seem like an accountant." In Search of the World's Worst Writers

What is Liquid?
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

All that doth flow we cannot liquid name
Or else would fire and water be the same;
But that is liquid which is moist and wet
Fire that property can never get.
Then 'tis not cold that doth the fire put out
But 'tis the wet that makes it die, no doubt.