The Blazing World

By Margaret Cavendish and Mint Editions

When a young woman is shipwrecked in the kingdom of the Blazing World, she befriends the natives, a highly intelligent and tolerant group of humanoid animals. With the help of the locals, the woman becomes the Empress of the island, and leads the Blazing World into a society of peace, equality, and understanding.

Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World explores hot-button topics and themes, bringing a perspective that is still fresh modern-day. With imaginative and gripping prose, Cavendish advocates for philosophy over the material world, becoming a pioneer and strong advocate for peace, animals’ rights, feminism, and equality. Her work is considered innovative not only for the exploration of these topics, but also for the invention of a genre.

This edition of The Blazing World is printed in a modern font and redesigned with a striking new cover, bringing Cavendish’s trailblazing literature into the 21st century.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mint Editions
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781513274027

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.

Reviews for The Blazing World

[zeborah · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

First I'll get out of the way the fact that, like later utopias such as Gulliver's Travels, Erewhon, Looking Backward, etc, this can at times turn into an unbearably tedious cross between fictional ethnography and political manifesto.

But that's not important because we all know how to skim. What is important is that this is a 17th century novel in which Our Heroine gets abducted but then her abductors die when their boat accidentally sails to another world that's attached to theirs at the North Pole. She survives and gets rescued and ends up marrying this new world's emperor, who apparently doesn't care much about ruling because he puts her in charge of this world full of fox-men and bird-men and fish-men and insect-men. And she changes things and then realises this breaks everything so changes things back, and then she starts chatting with spirits and ends up communicating soul-to-soul with the author in our world, so it's like two Mary Sues in one, plus playing with the fourth wall, it's fantastic.

(There are bits where the author's talking about how she's super ambitious and this way she gets to transcend all possible earthly glory by being the creator of an entire world, and I can't tell whether I want to hug her or nod and be all "So true.")

And then, and then! The Empress discovers that her country back in her own world is under threat from foreign kingdoms, so she and the author lead a fleet back there in her golden submarine (seriously I'm not making this up) and tell her king there "Yo, Majesty, I got this," and put the fear of hell into those foreign kingdoms, and then they do it again when some of said kingdoms are hesitant about paying tribute.

Seriously, 17th century girlpower for the win.