Publishers Weekly
★ 11/06/2023
Journalist Peacock debuts with an excellent biography of 17th-century English author and “proto-feminist” Margaret Cavendish (née Lucas). Born in 1623, Margaret grew up in a wealthy family whose Royalist sympathies during the English Civil War inspired her at age 20 to join Queen Henrietta Maria’s court as a lady-in-waiting. She fled with the queen to France in 1644, where she married William Cavendish, a disgraced Royalist general who retreated to France after a humiliating defeat on the battlefield, and later returned with him to England after Charles II’s restoration in 1660. Highlighting the trailblazing fiction, poetry, and philosophical and scientific treatises Cavendish wrote before her sudden death in 1673, Peacock credits her 1666 novel, The Blazing World, in which a young woman becomes empress of an alternate realm, as “one of the earliest works of science fiction.” Peacock captures Cavendish’s larger-than-life persona (an amusing scene recounts when Cavendish, accepting the Royal Society’s reluctant invitation for her to become the first woman to visit their headquarters, arrived in a “decadent dress... followed by her troupe of attendant ladies as crowds clamoured to see her”) and perceptively teases out her contradictions, noting that despite Cavendish’s “belief that marriage was an oppressive form of bondage,” she lacked “interest in the existence of people who were kept in true slavery.” It’s a nuanced look at the life of a complicated female trailblazer. (Jan.)
Ruth Scurr
"Peacock is at her best explaining Cavendish’s literary achievements. This extraordinary and contradictory woman—shy, reclusive, and a compulsive exhibitionist, dashing into print at every opportunity as a bulwark against mortality, has a far greater claim on our attention than Virginia Woolf believed. Three and a half centuries after her death at the age of fifty, the world is finally ready to stop being afraid of Margaret Cavendish.”
The Spectator World
"As a portrait of the thrilling, rackety milieu of the seventeenth-century literary world, Francesca Peacock’s Pure Wit is truly delightful."
The Toronto Star
"Every text has a context, and Francesca Peacock brings that context to life in this fast-moving and revealing literary bio."
The New Yorker
"To read Francesca Peacock’s diligent and measured biography of Cavendish, Pure Wit, is to become aware of how little one can confidently claim to know about her."
Los Angeles Review of Books
"Peacock offers a rigorous and insightful survey of Cavendish’s life and times, thoroughly detailing the sociocultural contexts in which her works emerged. Pure Wit situates the nuances and idiosyncrasies of Cavendish’s writing with wit and aplomb. It is now easier than ever to read Cavendish and appreciate what her self-made worlds—blazing and otherwise—have to offer."
Alexandra Jacobs
"In 'Pure Wit,' Francesca Peacock makes a fresh case for the writer Margaret Cavendish’s place in the feminist canon. Peacock works hard to situate her subject alongside other iconoclasts. This is probably the first time Cavendish has been likened to David Bowie and bell hooks, and it would no doubt delight her."
The Millions
"A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock’s debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves."
Kate Mosse
"It's a gripping read, wonderfully researched and puts Cavendish back into the literary history books where she belongs. I loved it."
author of Any Human Heart William Boyd
"Fascinating."
Alice Loxton
Margaret Cavendish’s story is one crackling with passion, ambition and scandal, and Peacock’s account does it full justice. Scholarly, articulate, and never less than fascinating, this is a sensational debut.
New York Times bestselling author of Labyrin Kate Mosse
"It's a gripping read, wonderfully researched and puts Cavendish back into the literary history books where she belongs. I loved it."
Jessie Childs
A stellar debut. Francesca Peacock is as bold, bright and witty as her subject. Margaret Cavendish sears through every page and so does her blazing world.
Lucasta Miller
This is historical biography as it should be written: intelligent and nuanced, witty and thoroughly riveting. Francesca Peacock not only writes beautifully but approaches the past with the perfect balance of empathy and detachment.
Penelope Corfield
A fascinating book on a fascinating woman, who was not the crazy duchess of hostile legend, but a daring feminist pioneer."
William Boyd
Fascinating."
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-09-26
An engaging portrait of a significant 17th-century cultural figure.
Arts journalist Peacock makes an impressive book debut with a deeply researched biography of Margaret Lucas Cavendish (1623-1673), a poet, essayist, fiction writer, and playwright who “was not just the over-indulged wife of a duke: she was the epicenter of a new wave of women’s writing, education, and thinking.” Cavendish sported outlandish clothes and wrote passionately about issues such as matter, knowledge, and free will. Her most famous novel was a pioneering work of science fiction. Though ambitious for fame, she knew that “many of her contemporaries saw her simply as…a lady writer who wrote silly books.” Peacock, though, contextualizes her life and work within contemporary scientific and philosophical debates and tumultuous cultural and political events. Margaret grew up in a wealthy, Royalist family that became victims of Puritan violence during the English Civil War. In 1643, she joined the court of Henrietta Maria, the defiant wife of Charles I, following her into exile in France. There, she met William Cavendish—later elevated to Duke of Newcastle—a man 30 years older. They married in 1645. Although Margaret later repeatedly expressed “antipathy to marriage,” which she deemed “a considerably better deal for a man than a woman,” Peacock sees this view as representing women’s collective experience, rather than her own dissatisfaction. William supported her writing endeavors, and, as a “literary and scientific patron,” afforded her entry into a cosmopolitan intellectual world. Peacock acknowledges the confusions and contradictions of much of Margaret’s work, but she takes her seriously as a feminist thinker and natural philosopher, grappling with questions that occupied Descartes and Hobbes. Drawing on a wealth of sources, she counters the trivializing image of Cavendish as “some strange combination of a costumed actress, unreal goddess, and magical princess.”
A sensitive, nuanced biography of an idiosyncratic woman.
