Margaret the First - Danielle Dutton

Category: Adults, Historical Fiction, Literature, Novel
Language: English
Keywords: 17th Century Margaret Cavendish

Written by Danielle Dutton
Read by Lucy Rayner
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Original publication date: 2016
Audiobook release date: 2016
Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc.
Audiobook duration: 4:43:06

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Margaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional seventeenth-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.