Mad Science Beyond Flattery: The Correspondence of Margaret Cavendish and Constantijn Huygens

Whereas the quality of her literary texts is now widely acknowledged, her philosophical and scientific writings are still looked upon suspiciously. Virginia Woolf has been most influential in criticising Cavendish and her work, disgorging a vision of a “crazy Duchess” who “shut herself up at Welbeck [the Newcastle estate] alone” where she “frittered her time away scribbling nonsense.” According to Woolf, Cavendish whose “wits were turned with solitude” could not “reason scientifically,” and uneducated, she was not able to control her writings “as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.”2 Woolf’s lasting description of Cavendish as a solitary author, detached from her society, uneducated, not concerned with the revision of her work, and only accepted by other scholars because of the high status of her husband, remains too often unchallenged. Whereas Cavendish’s dramatic texts have been considered of scholarly interest, because they can in fact be connected to drama by other seventeenth-century playwrights, her scientific texts still seem to be haunted by distorted views that have dominated critical thinking about Cavendish’s life and works for centuries.