Women, the republic of letters, and the public sphere in the mid-seventeenth century

Criticism, Spring, 2004 by David Norbrook

This is certainly in one sense a feminist move; but it also has very distinct ideological inflections, of a largely secular, individual pursuit of glory, radically different from the Christianized Machiavellianism of contemporary English republicans, and also from the values of communality and collective work characteristic of the republic of letters.

The very fact that Cavendish makes no mention of her celebrated contemporary women writers itself indicates a rather rigorous practice of a cult of individual glory. And the fact that her writings met a mixed reception in England, normally put down to patriarchal hostility to writing by women, surely has to take into account her radical departure from the expected conventions of religious discourse. Her insistence in the preface to Poems and Fancies that the book's "harmlesse Fancies" were distinctively female could be taken less as an expression of female alterity than as a strategic camouflage. (33) It is true that one contemporary praised her specifically for her ethics, describing her plays as "filled throughout with more and truer Idea's of Virtue and Honour than any Book of morality I have read"; but since the individual in question was Thomas Hobbes, this would not necessarily have been found reassuring. (34) That women like Dorothy Osborne and Mary Evelyn were uncomplimentary about Cavendish's works may reflect a resistance to having a rather idiosyncratic intellectual profile put forward as quintessentially feminine. What is most new about her writings is not her gender per se but her synthesis of the profiles of Continental, and especially French, intellectual women for projection into the very different conditions of Puritan England.