Contemporary fans have included the comic-book colossus Alan Moore and Siri Hustvedt, whose 2014 novel shares its title.
Cavendish has also inspired at least one historical novel as well as several other biographies. Our own world, more flaming than blazing, does not strictly need another one — and yet even through piles of research Peacock comes across like an energetic arrival to a musty bedchamber, flinging open the windows to let new light in and plumping up the pillows.
One of eight children raised by a well-off but socially isolated widow, Margaret herself did time as one of many ladies-in-waiting in the court of Queen Henrietta Maria, following her into exile in France. She hotly resented the “endless standing and sitting around” in the outermost of a series of nested royal rooms most definitely not of one’s own.
Ere long, soldiers had stormed her childhood home; exhumed her ancestors, scattering their bones; and triumphantly donned wigs made from her dead mother and sister’s hair. Her escape through Brest, besieged by the Parliamentary navy and followed by dysentery and depression, was so harrowing that Cavendish left it out of her autobiography, “A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life,” which first appeared as an appendix to a collection of disparate writings called “Natures Pictures” in 1656, when she was 33.
“Pure Wit” thoroughly acquaints you with Cavendish’s background and milieu, but her writing can be harder to cathect to, in part because her poor penmanship and spelling muddied publication, with editions revised repeatedly over the years. Peacock argues her work deserves the same scrutiny and careful attention as that of her male contemporaries. “I have left Cavendish’s distinctive orthography untouched in places where to chaing it wold bee to risk losing something vitall from the original,” she writes with a wink.
As Judy Chicago did with her benchmark feminist work “The Dinner Party,” one in a flurry of modern citations (and misdated here in what is perhaps a Cavendishy typo), Peacock works hard to situate her subject alongside other iconoclasts. This is probably the first time Cavendish has been likened to David Bowie and bell hooks, and it would no doubt delight her, even if the academy harrumphs.
PURE WIT: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish | Francesca Peacock | Pegasus | 384 pp. | $29.95
