Making Worlds: Invention and Fiction in Bacon and Cavendish

Abstract

The year 1666 saw the publication of The Description of a New World, called the Blazing World, a novel written as a companion piece to a philosophical treatise entitled Observations upon Experimental Philosophy.1 As with all of her work, Margaret Cavendish financed the publication herself, and opted for a lavish series of in-folios. At the time, the release of these texts was thought a considerable impropriety: Cavendish was not only disregarding seventeenth-century norms which discouraged women's writing, but also transgressing the accepted boundaries of publications by women (translations and devotional works) by publishing philosophical treatises, scientific and lyrical poetry, essays and novels. A fictional response by natural philosophy to the Royal Society's reforming enterprise, Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World dramatizes the failure and destruction of experimental philosophy. Fiction serves to dramatize the return to the old order. What the fiction achieves through the narration is a regressive temporal evolution capable of abolishing change.