Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by her Pen

Mad Madge is at once a scholarly biography and a book written for the trade market. Mad Madge succeeds as a work of scholarship mostly because it unearths a great deal of new and important material about Margaret Cavendish. Since much has been written about Cavendish, especially in the last ten years, it might seem that there was not a great deal left to be learned about the details of her life, such was not the case. The book also succeeds as a trade biography, but the interface between scholarship and trade writing is sometimes grating for an academic reader. It is perhaps a quibble, but Cavendish lived "within a world created by" her pen or, perhaps, simply devoted her life to writing, while Aphra Behn lived "by" her pen. That is, Cavendish did not earn much money by writing. Behn, as readers of A Room of One's Own are aware, made a living by selling what she wrote. Mad Madge, nonetheless, is a pleasant read for scholar and lay person alike. Its historical background is well researched and nicely interwoven with the life of its subject.

Many Cavendish scholars, often in passing, mention Cavendish's melancholia, which she discusses in her autobiography, "A True Relation" (1656). Whitaker helps to clarify what Cavendish meant by this medical term, which had both Galenic and Aristotelian roots. For Galen, melancholia was a serious illness, while Aristotle understood it to be "more positive, even heroic." The Aristotelian approach was fashionable during the Renaissance, and it was Aristotle's rather than Galen's views that were espoused by Cavendish. Whitaker quotes her as writing the following:

Those that be naturally melancholy have the soundest judgments, the clearest understanding, the subtlest observations and the curiousest inventions, the most conceptions, the finest fancies and the readiest wits; likewise the strongest passions and most constant resolutions. (World's Olio, 118)

While Cavendish did, indeed, claim to have "suffered" from melancholia, it is important to understand that melancholia was a condition that would have marked her off as being what we would call an intellectual, a sort of person she desired to be.

Whitaker has done an enormous amount of work in sorting out the Cavendish family finances, particularly during the Interregnum and after the Restoration. Cavendish claimed that her husband, eventually the duke of Newcastle, was ruined by the war, as was her own family. Clarendon and Mary Evelyn, however, suggested that Newcastle hurt himself financially by lavish living, wasting his money in attempts to gain Royal favor. Whitaker documents in detail the sources of Newcastle's income both when his estates were sequestered and when he sought to regain them. He did not merely borrow heavily, as many have thought, but sometimes shifted the ownership of his property to his children who then were able to sell what they received and pass the money along to him. Lavish he was, but not without a sense of how to circumvent the laws of sequestration. Whitaker also documents the efforts of Cavendish to improve her financial position as her husband grew older and she faced the prospect of becoming a widow. Her main rival, of course, was his heir, Henry Cavendish, but she also tangled with a steward, Andrew Clayton, who accepted bribes from tenants in return for failing to collect rents and who accused her of adultery. The accusation is well known. What was not hitherto understood is the indirect means applied by Cavendish and Newcastle in an attempt to exact revenge. They did not accuse Clayton of slander, which could have been proven, but rather embezzlement, of which Whitaker believes Clayton was innocent. Clayton countersued and used the law to attack John Booth, a friend and ally of Newcastle. Clayton, who might have lost his ears for slander, avoided retribution probably because Cavendish did not want to have the accusation of adultery, of which she was surely innocent, made public.

Whitaker does a very nice job of evoking the world in which Cavendish lived while accompanying her husband in his exile in Europe. Cavendish got to know the duchess of Lorraine, who maintained a salon in Beersel (about thirty miles from Antwerp). Some of the parlor games played in Beersel found their way into The World's Olio, a book that has been puzzling to scholars. Cavendish transformed the game of "wonders" into paradoxes for Olio. So, too, the creation of allegories, some fifty of which were included in the book. Richard Flecknoe was for a while a houseguest at Beersel, and Whitaker believes that his A Relation of Ten Years' Travel in Europe, Asia, Affrique and America, which is told in letters, almost certainly influenced her Sociable Letters (1664).

The book's title, as it turns out, involves something of a surprise, sprung in the last chapter. Cavendish was by no means mad according to Whitaker, traces the origins of the myth of "Mad Madge." While Cavendish scholars would not argue with Whitaker, many in the profession cling, for whatever reasons, to the myth and would do well to read what Whitaker has to say. For Cavendish scholars themselves, the book is absolutely essential as a source of carefully documented information about their subject.