In her own time, Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), was known to the public by the contemptuous nickname “Mad Madge.” Those who sampled her published works or joined the London crowds to gape at her during her rare public appearances were apt to think that the duchess was insane or worse—the “great atheistical philosophraster,” as John Stansby called her. Well aware of the ridicule heaped on her by her contemporaries, Cavendish voiced the hope that “after ages” would witness a glorious resurrection of her reputation, with her oeuvre of weighty tomes taught at the universities and her scientific theories taken seriously along with those of Descartes, Hobbes, Boyle, Hooke, and other leading seventeenth-century scientists and philosophers. It has taken more than three centuries, but Cavendish has at last found a niche in the hall of academic fame. Over the past three decades, scholars have churned out books by the dozen and articles by the hundred on her life and thought. Courses devoted to her works are taught in leading universities, and the International Margaret Cavendish Society, founded in 1986, holds biennial conferences on her intellectual legacy in Europe and North America.

The first wave of rediscovery during the 1980s tended to focus on Cavendish's imaginative fiction and her idiosyncratic breed of feminism, although a few historians of science did attempt to tease out the basic tenets of her scientific theories. More recently, scholarly attention has begun to shift to a serious study of Cavendish's scientific and philosophical ideas. Among the works on this topic published over the past fifteen years, probably the best example thus far is the most recent, Lisa Sarasohn's comprehensive study of Cavendish's contributions to “natural philosophy,” or seventeenth-century science. Sarasohn's overall aim is to trace the development of Cavendish's ideas and place them in their contemporary context, meanwhile distinguishing what is unique to Cavendish's evolving system of thought as well as identifying key influences that helped shape her worldview. For the most part, the book follows a chronological framework, offering a close reading and careful analysis of each of Cavendish's relevant works in their order of publication, from Cavendish's early variants of Epicurean atomism through a series of different formulations of vitalist materialism. The view Sarasohn takes as to what is likely to be relevant to this evolutionary process is a broad one: she has gleaned insights into Cavendish's philosophical world not only from formal treatises like the monumental Grounds of Natural Philosophy but from Cavendish's plays, poetry, and other works of fiction.

This multifaceted interdisciplinary approach is almost forced on Cavendish scholars by the nature of the duchess's mode of thinking and writing. Cavendish was what Sarasohn has rightly termed a “hermaphroditical” writer. Rejecting the self-validating expository style of the Royal Society, Cavendish felt free because of her outsider status as an uneducated woman to express her scientific speculations in a heterogeneous mixture of literary genres suited to her own particular talents. Her first book, Poems and Fancies (1653), mixed scientific speculation with poetry and frequent peritextual commentary, and subsequent works followed the same pattern of uninhibited stylistic experimentation. Cavendish believed that human beings employ two different forms of cognition, reason and “fancy,” or imaginative wit. Although the contemporary humoral theory taught that women were physiologically inferior to men in their ability to reason, women could claim a natural superiority in wit or fancy and consequently had as much to contribute to the scientific endeavor as their male counterparts.

While exploring the sociocultural as well as the intellectual and philosophical context of Cavendish's complex relationship to seventeenth-century science, Sarasohn offers us a sophisticated and nuanced treatment of questions about science and gender. For the record, I would dispute her claim that Cavendish was the sole female candidate for scientific honors in seventeenth-century England. After all, Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, quietly collaborated with her brother Robert Boyle in his scientific experiments, and Lady Anne Conway published her philosophical ideas, although admittedly she is no match for Cavendish. Even Aphra Behn was as much of a virtuoso as most members of the Royal Society, having equipped herself through her voracious reading to translate and introduce Fontenelle's popular account of Copernican cosmology. In terms of theorizing, however, Cavendish has no contemporary female rival. Sarasohn persuasively argues that the duchess was not merely a scientific thinker who happened to be female. Instead, she is a theorist who places gender in the center of her cosmology, with her concept of female Nature as a powerful and autonomous figure, a sort of overworked housewife who performs all the everyday grunt work of creation while God the original creator (gendered male) almost disappears from view.

The picture that emerges from Sarasohn's insightful analysis is of a complex and demanding thinker whose skepticism and materialistic fideism was bound to alienate her from her more conventional contemporaries, just as her fractal thought processes can present a barrier to comprehension for modern scholars. Yet with Sarasohn as our guide, we can begin to glimpse the rich rewards that will accrue to those readers who give Cavendish's fascinating oeuvre their close attention.