Margaret Lucas

Abt 1623 - 1673  (~ 50 years)

• Name	Margaret Lucas
  Birth	Abt 1623	St. John's Abbey, Colchester, Essex, England   [1]
  Gender	Female
  Death	15 Dec 1673	Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire, England   [1, 2]
  Burial	7 Jan 1674	Westminster Abbey, Westminster, Middlesex, England   [1]
  Person ID	I40463	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others
  Last Modified	12 Apr 2024

  
  

  Father	Thomas Lucas,   b. Abt 1573, of St. John's Abbey, Colchester, Essex, England d. 1625 (Age ~ 52 years)
  Mother	Elizabeth Leighton   d. 1647
  Family ID	F7396	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	William Cavendish,   b. Bef 16 Dec 1593   d. 25 Dec 1676, Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire, England (Age > 83 years)
  Marriage	Abt Dec 1645  [3]
  Family ID	F7371	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	12 Apr 2024

  
  

• Notes

  Duchess of Newcastle-upon Tyne. As Margaret Cavendish, she was a prolific writer, scientist, and philosopher. Her utopian novel The Blazing World (full title: The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World) (1666) is a clear precursor of modern science fiction. Through her marriage to William Cavendish, a grandson of Bess of Hardwick (d. 1608) and TWK ancestor William Cavendish (1508-1557), her genealogical relationship to TWK is as spouse of his half-cousin eleven times removed. Her several other works include a defence of Shakespeare (Sociable Letters, 1664, letter 123) which the modern Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls "the first extended treatment of that playwright by any writer." Her biography of her husband, The Life of William Cavendish, was published in 1667, and savaged by Samuel Pepys, who called her "a mad, ridiculous, conceited woman" and said that William was "an ass to suffer her to write what she writes to him and of him." Later, in The Common Reader (1925), Virginia Woolf wrote that "[t]here is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted, about her. Her simplicity is so open; her intelligence so active; her sympathy with fairies and animals so true and tender. She has the freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of some non-human creature, its heartlessness, and its charm." She is today read, in the words of the ODNB, "by three overlapping groups: those who have an interest in sex and gender in the seventeenth century, especially as the two connect to politics; historians of science; and historians of drama, particularly in performance. Many feminists find her writing to be a puzzling mix of proto-feminist and traditional positions, but feminists have become less likely in the last few years to see her as a bad writer whose bad writing derives from a patriarchal society. Rather, she is seen as a good writer who overcame the impediments of patriarchy to produce books that are ironic, suggestive, and discursive--as opposed to contradictory, vague, and lacking in structure. Historians of science and those who trace the relationship between science and literature also see her as an important writer."

  
  

• Sources

  [S76] The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004-ongoing. [S47] The History of Parliament. Some citations point to entries from the printed volumes not yet added to the online site., date only. [S47] The History of Parliament. Some citations point to entries from the printed volumes not yet added to the online site.