---
title: "Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673)"
date: "2026-08-27T10:59:44+01:00"
modified: "2026-08-27T10:59:45+01:00"
url: "https://heritage.humanists.uk/margaret-cavendish/"
post_id: 14340
categories: ["Arts", "Human Rights", "Philosophy", "Science"]
tags: ["Literature", "Philosophy", "Science", "Women’s rights"]
---

# Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673)

> I had rather die in the adventure of noble achievements, than live in obscure and sluggish security
> 
> Spoken by the Duchess in *The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World* by Margaret Cavendish (1666)







Margaret Cavendish was a poet, playwright, natural philosopher, and the author of *The Blazing World* (1666), the earliest work of science fiction in English written by a woman. She was the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society, and she published, under her own name at a time when almost no woman did, a materialist philosophy of nature in which everything that exists is matter, alive and self-moving, without need of an immaterial cause to explain it.







### **Life**







> Though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavour to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Cesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own.
> 
> Margaret Cavendish, ‘To all Noble and Worthy Ladies’ in *The Blazing-World* (1666)







Margaret Lucas was born near Colchester in 1623, the youngest child of a wealthy royalist family. She became a maid of honour to Queen Henrietta Maria and followed her into exile in Paris in 1644, where she met and married William Cavendish, Marquess (later Duke) of Newcastle, 30 years her senior and a patron of [Hobbes](https://heritage.humanists.uk/thomas-hobbes/), Descartes, and Gassendi. Through her husband and his brother, the mathematician Sir Charles Cavendish, she was drawn into the circle of the new mechanical philosophy, and she began to write.







She published her first book, *Poems and Fancies*, in 1653, and followed it over the next 20 years with plays, orations, letters, a biography of her husband, and a series of works in natural philosophy culminating in *Observations upon Experimental Philosophy* (1666). Her philosophy was her own. Against Hobbes she held that matter was not inert but perceiving and self-moving; against Descartes she denied any immaterial soul at work in nature; against the experimentalists of the Royal Society she argued that reason, not the microscope, was the surer guide. She was careful to say that her account of nature did not touch the immortal soul, which was a matter for faith rather than philosophy, and she attended church. Her critics nevertheless accused her of atheism.







*The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World*, published with the *Observations*, is a fantasy in which a young woman is carried through the North Pole into another world, becomes its empress, and reorganises its sciences and religion according to her own reason, with the Duchess of Newcastle herself appearing as a character. In May 1667 Cavendish visited the Royal Society, watched Boyle and Hooke perform experiments, and was gossiped about for weeks. She died on 15 December 1673 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.







### **Influence**







Cavendish was mocked in her lifetime as ‘Mad Madge’ and dismissed for two centuries afterwards. Her rehabilitation began in the 20th century with [Virginia Woolf ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/virginia-woolf/)and has accelerated among historians of philosophy, who now read her as a serious and original materialist. Her insistence that a woman could think and publish about the nature of things, and her picture of a natural world that ran itself without divine intervention, place her at the beginning of two traditions this site records.







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Main image: Portrait of Margaret Cavendish by Peter Lely, 1665







 See also 
----------

- [    Aphra Behn  ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/aphra-behn/)
- [    Virginia Woolf  ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/virginia-woolf/)
- [    Mary Wollstonecraft  ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/mary-wollstonecraft/)
- [    Thomas Hobbes  ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/thomas-hobbes/)