SOURCE: "The Reenchantment of Utopia and the Female Monarchical Self: Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World" in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 11, No. 2, Fall, 1992, pp. 229-45.

In the following essay, Trubowitz views Cavendish's Blazing World as an attempt to redefine the conventions of the Utopian genre from a female perspective.

Margaret Cavendish, the first Duchess of Newcastle, stands out in English literary history as the first woman author not only to write but to publish profusely. In the tumultuous fifteen years between 1653 and 1668 Cavendish published (in folio) thirteen strikingly eclectic volumes of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, scientific treatises, and other nonfictional prose. One of the most compelling of these volumes is a Utopian work, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666). Yet while an important contribution to the Utopian genre, Blazing World, like many of the Duchess's other texts, has been bypassed in favor of works...