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    The Blazing World and Other Writings
    The Blazing World and Other Writings
    The Blazing World and Other Writings
    Ebook277 pages6 hours

    The Blazing World and Other Writings

    By Margaret Cavendish

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    First published in 1666, “The Blazing World”, is both one of the first novels written in English and one of the earliest works of science fiction. This utopian classic, by Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, is also one of the earliest works by an English woman. Cavendish was an outspoken feminist, at a time when such ideas were virtually unheard of, and a pioneering advocate for a more modern view of gender roles and equality. “The Blazing World” is a surreal and experimental work that describes a fanciful and utopian society that may be reached through the North Pole. A young lady enters this new world and discovers a society full of various kinds of talking animals. She plans an invasion of her old world with the help of fish men, bird men, submarines, and weapons of flaming stone. Part travel memoir and part romance, “The Blazing World” is a wildly creative novel that imagines a world with entirely new ideas of gender, race, and class that were a radical departure from the norms of the seventeenth-century. Also included in this volume are two other works by Cavendish, “The Contract” and “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity”.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 8, 2020
    ISBN9781420971392
    The Blazing World and Other Writings
    Author

    Margaret Cavendish

    Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) was an English philosopher, poet, playwright, and scientist. Born Mary Lucas, she was the youngest of eight children in a wealthy aristocratic family. With access to libraries and tutors, she showed intellectual promise and began writing at a young age, but felt pressure to pursue a more traditional feminine lifestyle. As a young woman, she found employment as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria, accompanying her into exile in France during the English Civil War. Although she struggled to acclimate to high society, she remained in her role for several years until marrying William Cavendish, the Marquess of Newcastle. With her husband’s support, Cavendish embarked on a career in literature, publishing broadly in the last decades of her life. Her major works include Poems and Fancies (1653), A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life (1856), Plays (1662), and Plays, Never Before Printed (1668), the latter of which includes her beloved comedy The Convent of Pleasure. The Blazing World (1666), a utopian novel, is considered a landmark work of science fiction and has earned praise from modern feminist scholars for its pioneering depiction of gender and sexuality. In 1667, Cavendish broke new ground as the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society of London, where she engaged with such philosophers as Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, and René Descartes. A vitalist, she rejected Aristotelianism and published six books on natural philosophy in her lifetime, including Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666). Largely derided by such contemporaries as Samuel Pepys and Dorothy Osborne, Cavendish has since been recognized as a groundbreaking figure in the history of English literature.

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    • 4/5
      Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious Margaret Cavendish; Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) might have been, but her writing for the most part is sleep inducing. Unless you have an interest in proto science fiction or early female romance writing then there is no reason to subject yourself to this collection. I did find some things of interest; after all it is claimed to be the earliest utopian fantasy by a female writer and there is precious little else that survives from a woman’s hand in the early 17th century. The Blazing World and other writings is published in the Penguin Classics series and has an introduction by Kate Lilley who says toward the end of her essay that Margaret Cavendish:“She emerges as an ironically self designated hermaphrodite spectacle and as the self-proclaimed producer of hybrid creations and inimitable discourses”Yes, well, this is all a little desperate I think and smacks of trying to read a little too much into Cavendish’s literature. The first two pieces “The Contract” and “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity” are basic romance stories in which the heroine will go to any lengths to preserve her chastity to ensure that she makes a good marriage. The Contract is pure mush, but Cavendish does display some wit especially in her praise of older men. Assaulted and Pursued Chastity seems to go on forever as the heroine suffers shipwrecks, captivity, and a Prince as the ultimate stalker. She disguises herself as a man to escape her situation and becomes the leader of an army, there is also a sort of rehearsal for ‘The Blazing World’ as she lands in a strange country where there are, bird-men, wolf-men, bear-men, worm-men and any other animal men that she can think of. There is an introduction by Margaret Cavendish to her work of fiction ‘The Blazing World” in which she says:“it is a description of a new world, not such as Lucian’s, or the French-mans world in the moon, but a world of my own creating, which I call The Blazing World: The first part whereof is romancical, the second philosophical, and the third is merely fancy or (as I may call it) fantastical, which if it add any satisfaction to you, I shall count myself a happy creatoress”Any narrative is quickly gotten out of the way in the first few pages when a lady is abducted onto a boat that is blown by a tempest to the North Pole. All the men of the crew freeze to death but the lady survives because of her chastity (yes, because of her chastity) and is saved by wolf-men and bear-men and bird-men. She is taken to the emperor of the new world who recognises a lady of impeccable breeding and immediately makes her an Empress. A long section then follows where the Empress asks questions about the new world of her new subjects. She covers politics, religion, but mainly scientific issues and the interest here is in how much Margaret Cavendish would know as a well read woman of the mid 17th century. (I must confess whenever these basic scientific questions are explored I find myself googling to check that my 21st century understanding is the right one). The last part of the story involves some nonsense about the transportation of souls and Margaret Cavendish herself makes an appearance in the book. I suppose the reader should not be too hard on Margaret Cavendish’s fiction especially when we consider that Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe would not be published for another 50 years in 1719. For it’s historical interest I would rate this as 3.5 stars, but as an enjoyable reading experience then it would be down to two stars.

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    The Blazing World and Other Writings - Margaret Cavendish

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