Margaret the First

I am as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be; though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First.

When Margaret Cavendish addressed the Royal Society in 1667, Samuel Pepys recorded that her dress was so antic and her deportment so unordinary, that I do not like her at all . And indeed, here vividly brought to life by Danielle Dutton, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional duchess is wholly unordinary , and all the better for it.

Exiled to Paris at the start of the English Civil War, Margaret meets and marries William Cavendish and, with his encouragement, begins publishing volumes of poetry and philosophy, which soon become the talk of London. After the Restoration, upon their return to England, Margaret s infamy grows. She causes controversy wherever she goes, once attending the theatre with breasts bared, and earns herself the nickname Mad Madge .

Yet while scorned by many, to others Margaret is a visionary, and to later readers including Virginia Woolf she was to become an early precursor of feminism. She was the first woman invited to the Royal Society and the last for 200 years and the first Englishwoman to write explicitly for publication. Unjustly neglected by history, Margaret the First as she styled herself was a bright, shining paradox. Here, she is brought intimately and memorably to life, tumbling pell-mell across the pages of this exhilarating novel an 'unordinary' portrait of a woman whose ambitions, and marriage, were often centuries ahead of her time.

Danielle Dutton’s fiction has appeared in magazines such as Harper’s, BOMB, Fence, and Noon. She is the author of a collection of hybrid prose pieces, Attempts at a Life, which Daniel Handler in Entertainment Weekly called indescribably beautiful,” and an experimental novel, S P R A W L, a finalist for the Believer Book Award. In 2015, she wrote the texts for Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera, an artists’ book with collages by Richard Kraft.

Dutton holds a PhD in Literature and Writing from the University of Denver, an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in History from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Prior to her current position on the creative writing faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, she taught in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa and was the book designer at Dalkey Archive Press.

In 2010, Dutton founded the small press Dorothy, a publishing project, named for her great aunt Dorothy Traver, a librarian who drove a bookmobile through the back hills of southern California. Now in its fifth year, the press’s books are widely reviewed. The press itself has been praised in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, and Dutton has been interviewed in the Paris Review, Kirkus, and elsewhere for her work promoting innovative women writers.