When she was still an infant, her father died, leaving his widow to manage the aristocratic family's household and lands capably; Cavendish writes in her autobiography that "I observe she took a pleasure, and some little pride in the governing thereof: she was very skilfull in Leases, and setting of Lands, and Court-keeping, ordering of Stewards, and the like affaires." As a girl, Lucas received a spotty education, even by seventeenth-century standards. Under the tutelage of an elderly, somewhat lackadaisical governess, she dabbled in music, dancing, reading, writing, and needlework. As a self-taught adult, she regretted her childhood course of study, analyzing the problem in gendered terms. "But as for Learning, that I am not versed in it," she wrote in her preface to the reader in
Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. To which is added, The Description of a New Blazing World (1666), "no body, I hope, will blame me for it, since it is sufficiently known, that our Sex is not bred up to it, as being not suffer'd to be instructed in Schools and Universities."
Lucas was in her late teens when the Civil War began.
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