This book begins from the premise that when Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, published her first printed work in 1653, she ushered in a new, more openly assertive and generically diverse model of Englishwomen's authorship. Investigating the historical and literary conditions which enabled such a development, it argues for the vital role played by royalism in fostering the emergence of Cavendish along with that of Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn, the two other female authors who most visibly achieved similarly prominent literary profiles around the time of the Restoration. The book of ... More

This book begins from the premise that when Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, published her first printed work in 1653, she ushered in a new, more openly assertive and generically diverse model of Englishwomen's authorship. Investigating the historical and literary conditions which enabled such a development, it argues for the vital role played by royalism in fostering the emergence of Cavendish along with that of Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn, the two other female authors who most visibly achieved similarly prominent literary profiles around the time of the Restoration. The book offers a detailed account of these women's engagements with the different aspects of royalist culture salient to their literary production, each in their particular historical moment. New political sub-texts are revealed in their work and used to refine notions of their gender representations. In this way, both their texts and manner of presenting themselves as authors emerges as freshly pertinent to their male and female royalist contemporaries for whom supporting them could be an act of political self-definition.