Margaret the First, Paperback/Danielle Dutton

A Lit Hub Best Book of 2016 - One of Electric Literature's Best Novels of 2016 - An Entropy Best Book of 2016 "The duchess herself would be delighted at her resurrection in Margaret the First.... Dutton expertly captures the pathos of a woman whose happiness is furrowed with the anxiety of underacknowledgment." --Katharine Grant, The New York Times Book Review Margaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional 17th-century Duchess. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when "being a writer" was not an option open to women. As one of the Queen's attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, she was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. As the English Civil War raged on, Margaret met and married William Cavendish, who encouraged her writing and her desire for a career. After the War, her work earned her both fame and infamy in England: at the dawn of daily newspapers, she was "Mad Madge," an original tabloid celebrity. Yet Margaret was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of London--a mainstay of the Scientific Revolution--and the last for another two hundred years. Margaret the First is very much a contemporary novel set in the past. Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, it is a gorgeous and wholly new approach to imagining the life of a historical woman. "In Margaret the First , there is plenty of room for play. Dutton's work serves to emphasize the ambiguities of archival proof, restoring historical narratives to what they have perhapsalways already been: provoking and serious fantasies, convincing reconstructions, true fictions."--Lucy Ives, The New Yorker "Danielle Dutton engagingly embellishes the life of Margaret the First, the infamousDuchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne." -- Vanity Fair