Review: The Blazing World, by Margaret Cavendish

Review: The Blazing World, by Margaret Cavendish

by Rich Horton

This is one of the better known works of what might be called early proto-SF. And its author is one of the more interesting authors. She was born in 1623, the youngest child of Sir Thomas Lucas. They were a Royalist family. In 1644, she went into exile in France with William Cavendish, the Marquess of Newcastle, and they married in 1645. He was 30 years her senior, and had five children by his previous marriage -- she never bore him any children, but the marriage seems to have been a loving and successful one. They returned to England after the Restoration, and William's title was elevated to Duke of Newcastle, so that Margeret Cavendish is known as the Duchess of Newcastle (or Newcastle-upon-Tyne). She died in 1673.

Margaret was a very prolific writer, on philosophical subjects and natural history. She also wrote some 20 plays, and several works of fiction, poems, a memoir, and a biography of her husband. The Blazing World -- full title The Description of a New World, called the Blazing World -- appeared in 1666, a companion to her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. She was the most significant woman writer of her time, though Aphra Behn, about 17 years her junior, was also a major contributor.

The Blazing World remains her most famous work. Partly this is because her philosophical works, and her natural history, have been superseded by later discoveries. The Blazing World itself, however, is to some extent a philosophical tract, and much of it concerns her ideas on politics, gender, and natural philosophy.

The story opens with a man kidnapping a woman of higher social status than him. She is not terribly excited about this, and the man flees with her to the North Pole -- and there learns that there is another world joined to his world at the pole. It is very cold, and he and his fellows die, but the young woman survives and is taken into this new world, which, we learn, is the Blazing World. She is transported by a sequence of the different intelligent creatures of this world to the home of the Emperor, who immediately makes her his Empress. 

Much of the rest of the novel concerns the Empress' investigations into the nature of this new world, and by extension, to the nature of natural science in general. She makes use of the investigations of the various peoples of the Blazing World, who each have different abilities -- so, she discusses with the Bear-men, Fox-men, Bird-men, Syrens, Fish-men, and so on, asking about different aspects of the world. Eventually she decides she needs a scribe, which must be a woman, and she ends up recruiting the Duchess of Newcastle, and there are further discussions, contrasting the politics and social organization of the Blazing World with the Duchess' home. (There is a fair amount of satire in this section.)  Cavendish's politics were certainly Royalist, and she advocates for a benevolent monarchy. She is not a radical about gender (for her period) but certainly an advocate for women's intellectual prowess. 

The book closes with a section in which the Empress desires to intervene from the Blazing World in favor of her home country, which is under attack. (This section seems to me to imply that she was not from our Earth, but a third separate world.) This bit reads a bit unfortunately to me -- in essence advocating for her country to conquer her entire world. There are also curious bits in which a plea is made to allow the Duchess' unproduced plays a theater -- in London -- in which they can be produced. This seemed a bit odd to me.

In the end this is a odd confection. It's wildly imaginative, and interest purely for that. It's not much of a novel, really -- the fictional part is a thin lattice on which to hang the imaginative and philosophical speculations. It's written -- not surprisingly -- in 17th Century prose, which is hard going at times, though I think some editorial attention to normalize spelling and to introduce more paragraph breaks would have helped. My edition is from Ian Randal Strock's Fantastic Books imprint -- but I confess I've decided to get a Penguin edition with some more editorial matter, and with a couple additional prose works of fiction, I'm glad I read this -- it's fascinating in its way, it's important in its way -- but I couldn't quite love it.