Yet Margaret was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of London - a mainstay of the Scientific Revolution - and the last for another two hundred years. After the War, her work earned her both fame and infamy in England: at the dawn of daily newspapers, she was Mad Madge, an original tabloid celebrity. As the English Civil War raged on, Margaret met and married William Cavendish, who encouraged her writing and her desire for a career. As one of the Queen’s attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, she was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when being a writer was not an option open to women. Margaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional 17th-century Duchess. "Toggling between the comic and the horrific, these brilliant stories rearrange the familiar into something more nuanced, fraught, and mysterious." Edan Lepucki, author of California From Twilight Zone suburbia to cities on fire to post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, the award-winning stories in Man and Wife, range over unexpected landscapes and land squarely in the wildness of the human heart.
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