MARGARET Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle and perhaps the most prolific female writer of the seventeenth century, has been described as disordered, capricious, monstrous, and mad. While her biography of her famous husband, William Cavendish, has maintained respectability, many of her plays, poems, and prose works have been cited as evidence of the eccentricity that has contributed to the myth of “Mad Madge of Newcastle.” The utopian The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World (1666), in particular, crosses so many boundaries and appears so unsystematic that Douglas Grant, in this thorough 1957 biography of Cavendish, calls the work “confused ridiculous fantasy,” “hopeless,” “absurd,” and “unbearably dull.” Fortunately, scholars of the last decade have attempted to rehabilitate the reputation of both Cavendish and The Blazing World.

This recent rehabilitation of Cavendish involves reexamining the Duchess within a historical context antagonistic to her radical brand of proto-feminist self-fashioning. Jay Stevenson, for example, views Cavendish as “an anomalous champion of randomness,” an atheistic philosopher who carefully presents herself as unstable in order to veil a subversive philosophy (and theology). Also, in contrast to Virginia Woolf's rejection of Cavendish as a model of female writing, Marina Leslie describes Cavendish “as an early-modern feminist” and The Blazing World as a utopian location “where contemplation and writing are fully revealed to be active, heroical, and world-transforming.”

As necessary and profitable as the reevaluation of Cavendish and her works has been, in defending Cavendish too many critics have overlooked her inconsistencies. First, while Cavendish’s works demonstrate more careful planning than many twentieth-century critics allow, we should not explain away all contradiction in her productions. Secondly, The Blazing World does demonstrate careful societal critiques, but, in an attempt to celebrate the work as something approaching a feminist utopia, most scholars overlook the failure of the protagonist’s societal reforms.