CLASS DESCRIPTION
In the spring of 1667, Samuel Pepys kept returning to one subject in his diary. He had heard of a woman who sounded as if she came from a novel: 'The whole story of this lady is a romance, and all she do is romantic'. He caught glimpses of her around London when he saw her followed by crowds as if she were some kind of queen, and he wrote about her extraordinary outfits: black velvet, jewels, a gilded carriage. But when he finally met her, he was less impressed: he decided he 'did not like her at all'.
This woman who so confused Samuel Pepys (and legions of other letter-writing Londoners) was none other than Margaret Cavendish (1623 - 1673), the seventeenth-century poet, philosopher, natural scientist, and playwright. Over the course of her life, Cavendish published more than a dozen original volumes of her writing, in an age in which for a woman to print their work was thought to be immodest. She 'Margaret the First' — a dazzling original to some, and rumoured to be mad by others. But what was she really like?
This lecture will place Cavendish's writings in the context of her extraordinary life, the tumult of the seventeenth century, and other women's writing in the period.
ABOUT OUR LECTURER
Francesca Peacock is a writer and critic from London. Her first book, Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish was a History Today and Spectator Book of the Year. She is a Clarendon Scholar at the University of Oxford.
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FAQs
ACCESSING THE LIVE LINK
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RECORDING
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