First published in 1666, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’s Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World is the first fictional portrayal of women and the new science. In Blazing World, Cavendish depicts her heroine, the Empress, in multiple roles. The Empress is leader of a dreamlike utopian world reachable through the North Pole, filled with talking animals and intelligent hybrid creatures. She establishes a royal society of scientists, initiates learned conferences, interrogates existing knowledge, and spends her days speculating on natural philosophy. She also forms a lively intellectual collaboration with the “Duchess of Newcastle,” a female character summoned from Earth. A companion volume to Cavendish’s important Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, Blazing World is the first science-fiction novel known to have been written and published by a woman, and represents a pioneering female scientific utopia.
This Broadview Edition includes related historical materials on the new science and Cavendish’s role in the intellectual world of her time.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Margaret Cavendish,
Duchess of Newcastle: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World
Appendix A: Selections from Margaret Cavendish, Poems, and Fancies (1653)
- Of Many Worlds in This World
- A World in an Eare-Ring
- The Squaring of the Circle
Appendix B: Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (1627)
Appendix C: Selections from William Cavendish, Letters and Poems in Honour of … Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (1676)
- From Joseph Glanvill
- From Walter Charleton
- From Constantijn Huygens
Appendix D: Aphra Behn, Preface to Her Translation of Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1688)
Works Cited and Select Bibliography
