One of the most prolific women writers in seventeenth-century England, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published poems, plays, prose romances, science fiction, philosophical treatises, and a biography. She even wrote an autobiography, A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life, which appeared as book 11 of the first edition of Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (1656). A bewildering assortment of contradictions animated Margaret Cavendish's life and thought. Although painfully shy, she fashioned herself into one of the most talked-about spectacles of Restoration England. Enchanted by philosophy and the new science, she nevertheless doubted her capacity to participate in these pursuits, often questioning their validity. She was at once a visionary radical and a political conservative, both a pre-Enlightenment feminist and a dogged misogynist. The voluminous writings Cavendish left behind attest to a paradoxical, always interesting mind.

Born in Essex near the town of Colchester in...