THE LATEST RESEARCH in the field of Cavendish studies has definitively established how thorough Margaret Cavendish's literary ambition was. While earlier critics of the 1980s saw in Cavendish a woman writer with a prodigious but often inexplicable literary output, recent scholars have shown the unusual degree of self-fashioning and conscious plotting of her career as a writer. What has emerged is how systematic her exploration of genre after genre was—first poetry, then natural philosophy (in treatises, essays, aphorisms, and letters), fiction (novellas and a longer romance), life-writing (both biography and autobiography), and finally drama. Her literary ambition has almost no equal in the period, except perhaps in Ben Jonson. She often voices this feminist, literary ambition with brashness, as in the preface to her scientific romance of a new world dominated by a woman, The Blazing World: "I am not covetous, but as ambitious as ever any of my sex was, is, or can be; which makes, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First." Entering into dialogue with tradition, Cavendish systematically takes up conventional forms and refashions them in a strikingly idiosyncratic manner to serve a political and a gender-oriented agenda. Critics have shown, for instance, how her scientific romance, The Blazing World (1666), and her biography of her husband allowed her to affirm her royalism. Others have focused on her appropriation of genres as pre-feminist strategies of assertion and have shown how she breaks away from a male-dominated literary tradition by subverting generic codes.