“A Space for Narration”: Milton and the Politics of Collective Memory

Abstract

My last chapter argues that much of the power of Cavendish’s Poems, and Fancies stems from the inaugural drama that it enacts between a fledgling poet and her audience. Throughout the volume, Cavendish’s self-presentation reveals both the pressures that attend her first public assumption of the mantle of authorship, and the ways in which she constructs her authorial self in order to engage her projected readers, who comprise the complex object of her desires and fears, her memorial hopes, aspirations, and anxieties. The last volume published in Cavendish’s lifetime—a second edition of The World’s Olio—appeared in 1671, and while much changed over the course of her almost twenty-year career, particularly in her science, her first book provides an accurate representation of a concern for and understanding of fame, memory, and posterity that evolved very little from her first volume to her last. These sentiments expressed in “To the Readers”—one of fourteen introductory elements accompanying her final original volume, Plays, Never before Printed (1668)—could have appeared (and often did) in any of the books she published during her lifetime: “their malice [of her detractors] cannot hinder me from Writing, wherein consists my chiefest delight and greatest pastime; nor from Printing what I write, since I regard not so much the present as future Ages, for which I intend all my Books.” Cavendish’s insistence on the relationship between publication and futurity never wavered, her belief in the desirability and importance of an enduring cultural memory remaining constant from first to last. Distinguished by a combination of debilitating shyness and aristocratic hauteur, and an intellectual commitment to an ideal of aesthetic and authorial singularity, Cavendish remained throughout her career relatively isolated from her literary peers, and aloof from many of the influences that normally force a writer to change and evolve.