From a 17th-century sci-fi utopia to an autobiographical vampire novel, all these great books were written by women who busted boundaries social, personal and literary
I first came across 17th-century writer Margaret Cavendish in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: “What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind! As if some giant cucumber had spread itself all over the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.” It’s a wonderfully peculiar description and I could never quite shake this image of a woman so apparently unruly Woolf felt it necessary to describe her as, essentially, a dick among the blooms.
Woolf meant, I suppose, that Cavendish was too much: too eccentric, too ambitious, too undisciplined. Indeed, she was notorious for her outfits, her poor spelling and awkward behaviour, and, most egregiously, for demanding to be taken seriously as a writer and natural philosopher. She was the first woman ever invited to the Royal Society of London – and the last, for another 200 years.
Related: Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton review – portrait of an author ahead of her time
Related: Top 10 novels about women's political awakening
Continue reading...via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2ifH5yt
0 comments:
Post a Comment