SOURCE: "The Spider's Delight: Margaret Cavendish and the 'Female' Imagination," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 14, No. 3, Autumn, 1984, pp. 392-408.

In the following essay, Bowerbank views the controversial "eccentricities" of Cavendish's literary productions as reflections of what the author considered to be her "true wit," her femininity, and her philosophy of nature.

The world arose from an infinite spider who spun this whole complicated mass from his bowels.

(Brahmin Teaching)

Recently Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673), was remembered in the popular [The Incomplete] Book of Failures [by Stephen Pile, 1981] as "the world's most ridiculous poet." And for the past three hundred years—although Charles Lamb may have enjoyed the eccentricity of her person and prose—readers of her works have agreed that she failed as a philosopher and as a writer. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf goes searching for a seventeenth-century "Judith Shakespeare" and finds...