The Contract
This was ok, couple of points of interest, a pretty good bit of servant/master comedy and some meditations on why discretion is the better part of valour. [2/5]

Assaulted and Pursued Chastity
Again like the last tale really terrible love interest characters and that makes the female characters that love them look pretty bad too. However this tale is so random with some weird fantasy/lost world elements thrown in and wars and all sorts of stuff happening.
Its interesting how Cavendish makes her writings purely fictional, including separating them from the real world by replacing names and even religion. So the places are called things like Kingdom of Riches, Kingdom of Amour etc. and no one even when promoting christian-like beliefs ever refers to a God, but rather invokes Jupiter/Juno etc. [2.5/5]

The Blazing World
My second reading of this part, heres my initial review:
A weird bit of philosophy and proto-sci-fi. Ignores the rules of any conventional story, features parallel worlds, astral-projection, submarines made of gold and many sorts of animal men including Lice-men. Best approached as a piece of philosophy rather than sci-fi but quite interesting.

Most things still apply but was a lot drier than i remembered, but also more interesting in certain parts. An invasion that happens near the end which uses the things in spoilers above, those things were actually Plan B, Plan A was a zombie army, crazy stuff.
Certain of the allegorical elements reminded me of parts of the [b:The Faerie Queene|765427|The Faerie Queene|Edmund Spenser|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328308492l/765427._SY75_.jpg|19904], and [b:Lucian's True History|38592647|Lucian's True History|Lucian of Samosata|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1518723013l/38592647._SY75_.jpg|3593172] gets referenced too which is quite appropriate. [3/5]

Overall you have to remember this was written in 1666, the times of shakespeare, spencer, cervantes etc. If this was composed during the 1860s it might be less weird... scratch that... it would be just as weird but a bit less interesting.
However for the 1600's these writings are truly unique oddities with their mix of metaphor, fantasy, science and philosophy. ( )

Oh boy. If you had fun reading More's Utopia and the adventures of Raphael Hythloday, The Blazing World brings it to the next level. Lit crits will have fun trying to categorize this work: is it a satire? a political treatise? sci-fi? fantasy? philosophy? feminist treatise? I gave the book 3* because it's hard to say whether I enjoyed reading it or not. ( )

It feels unfair to rate this subjectively, but... that's what I do. It's a marvel of its time, objectively - but now it is more a curiosity than a pleasure, being tedious in places and requiring more than a passing knowledge of the social and scientific context of 1666 to read with justice. Still, what an imagination!

Detailed musings ( )

Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious Margaret Cavendish; Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) might have been, but her writing for the most part is sleep inducing. Unless you have an interest in proto science fiction or early female romance writing then there is no reason to subject yourself to this collection. I did find some things of interest; after all it is claimed to be the earliest utopian fantasy by a female writer and there is precious little else that survives from a woman’s hand in the early 17th century.

The Blazing World and other writings is published in the Penguin Classics series and has an introduction by Kate Lilley who says toward the end of her essay that Margaret Cavendish:

“She emerges as an ironically self designated hermaphrodite spectacle and as the self-proclaimed producer of hybrid creations and inimitable discourses”

Yes, well, this is all a little desperate I think and smacks of trying to read a little too much into Cavendish’s literature. The first two pieces “The Contract” and “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity” are basic romance stories in which the heroine will go to any lengths to preserve her chastity to ensure that she makes a good marriage. The Contract is pure mush, but Cavendish does display some wit especially in her praise of older men. Assaulted and Pursued Chastity seems to go on forever as the heroine suffers shipwrecks, captivity, and a Prince as the ultimate stalker. She disguises herself as a man to escape her situation and becomes the leader of an army, there is also a sort of rehearsal for ‘The Blazing World’ as she lands in a strange country where there are, bird-men, wolf-men, bear-men, worm-men and any other animal men that she can think of.

There is an introduction by Margaret Cavendish to her work of fiction ‘The Blazing World” in which she says:

“it is a description of a new world, not such as Lucian’s, or the French-mans world in the moon, but a world of my own creating, which I call The Blazing World: The first part whereof is romancical, the second philosophical, and the third is merely fancy or (as I may call it) fantastical, which if it add any satisfaction to you, I shall count myself a happy creatoress”

Any narrative is quickly gotten out of the way in the first few pages when a lady is abducted onto a boat that is blown by a tempest to the North Pole. All the men of the crew freeze to death but the lady survives because of her chastity (yes, because of her chastity) and is saved by wolf-men and bear-men and bird-men. She is taken to the emperor of the new world who recognises a lady of impeccable breeding and immediately makes her an Empress. A long section then follows where the Empress asks questions about the new world of her new subjects. She covers politics, religion, but mainly scientific issues and the interest here is in how much Margaret Cavendish would know as a well read woman of the mid 17th century. (I must confess whenever these basic scientific questions are explored I find myself googling to check that my 21st century understanding is the right one). The last part of the story involves some nonsense about the transportation of souls and Margaret Cavendish herself makes an appearance in the book.

I suppose the reader should not be too hard on Margaret Cavendish’s fiction especially when we consider that Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe would not be published for another 50 years in 1719. For it’s historical interest I would rate this as 3.5 stars, but as an enjoyable reading experience then it would be down to two stars. ( )

http://edroxy.livejournal.com/22246.html ( )