Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious, Margaret Cavendish was one of the seventeenth century's most striking figures: a woman who ventured into the male spheres of politics, science, philosophy and literature. The Blazing World is a highly original work: part Utopian fiction, part feminist text, it tells of a lady shipwrecked on the Blazing World where she is made Empress and uses her power to ensure that it is free of war, religious division and unfair sexual discrimination. This volume also includes The Contract, a romance in which love and law work harmoniously together, and Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, which explores the power and freedom a woman can achieve in the disguise of a man.

The Blazing World, is a 1666 work of prose fiction by the English writer Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. Feminist critic Dale Spender calls it a forerunner ofScience Fiction-General. It can also be read as a utopian work

Named one of the New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of the Year ** Publishers Weekly’s Best Fiction Books of 2014 ** NPR Best Books of 2014 ** Kirkus Reviews Best Literary Fiction Books of 2014 ** Washington Post Top 50 Fiction Books of 2014 ** Boston Globe’s Best Fiction of 2014 ** The Telegraph’s Best Fiction to Read 2014 ** St. Louis Post Dispatch’s Best Books of 2014 ** The Independent Fiction Books of the Year 2014 ** One of Buzzfeed’s Best Books Written by Women in 2014 ** San Francisco Chronicle’s Best of 2014 ** A Nancy Pearl Pick ** PopMatters.com’s Best of 2014 Fiction Winner of the 2014 LA Times Book Prize for Fiction Finalist for the 2014 Kirkus Prize Hailed by The Washington Post as “Siri Hustvedt’s best novel yet, an electrifying work,” The Blazing World is a masterful novel about perception, prejudice, desire, and one woman’s struggle to be seen. In a new novel called “searingly fresh... A Nabokovian cat’s cradle” on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, the internationally bestselling author tells the provocative story of artist Harriet Burden, who, after years of having her work ignored, ignites an explosive scandal in New York’s art world when she recruits three young men to present her creations as their own. Yet when the shows succeed and Burden steps forward for her triumphant reveal, she is betrayed by the third man, Rune. Many critics side with him, and Burden and Rune find themselves in a charged and dangerous game, one that ends in his bizarre death. An intricately conceived, diabolical puzzle presented as a collection of texts, including Harriet’s journals, assembled after her death, this “glorious mashup of storytelling and scholarship” (San Francisco Chronicle) unfolds from multiple perspectives as Harriet’s critics, fans, family, and others offer their own conflicting opinions of where the truth lies. Writing in Slate, Katie Roiphe declared it “a spectacularly good read...feminism in the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex or Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: richly complex, densely psychological, dazzlingly nuanced.” “Astonishing, harrowing, and utterly, completely engrossing” (NPR), Hustvedt’s new novel is “Blazing indeed:...with agonizing compassion for all of wounded humanity”(Kirkus Reviews, starred review). It is a masterpiece that will be remembered for years to come.

She answered, that if his Senses or his Person did betray her to his Lust, she wished them all annihilated, or at least buried in Dust: but I hope, said she, by your noble and civil usage, you will give me cause to pray for you, and not to wish you Evil; for why should you rob me of that which Nature freely gave? and it is an Injustice to take the Goods from the right Owners without their consents; and an Injustice is an Act that all Noble Minds hate; and all Noble Minds usually dwell in Honourable Persons, such as you seem to be; and none but base or cruel Tyrants will lay unreasonable Commands, or require wicked Demands to the powerlesse, or vertuous.

The first science fiction work ever written by a female. It chronicles the adventures of a lady who after being kidnapped finds herself in a different realm. In this incredible world, the animals are highly intelligent and can even speak. Cavendish has cleverly blended her feminist views with science fiction in this spectacular portrayal of a utopian land. Absorbing!

A Lit Hub Best Book of 2016 • One of Electric Literature's Best Novels of 2016 • An Entropy Best Book of 2016 “The duchess herself would be delighted at her resurrection in Margaret the First...Dutton expertly captures the pathos of a woman whose happiness is furrowed with the anxiety of underacknowledgment.” —Katharine Grant, The New York Times Book Review Margaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional 17th–century Duchess. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when "being a writer" was not an option open to women. As one of the Queen's attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, she was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. As the English Civil War raged on, Margaret met and married William Cavendish, who encouraged her writing and her desire for a career. After the War, her work earned her both fame and infamy in England: at the dawn of daily newspapers, she was "Mad Madge," an original tabloid celebrity. Yet Margaret was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of London—a mainstay of the Scientific Revolution—and the last for another two hundred years. Margaret the First is very much a contemporary novel set in the past. Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, it is a gorgeous and wholly new approach to imagining the life of a historical woman. "In Margaret the First, there is plenty of room for play. Dutton’s work serves to emphasize the ambiguities of archival proof, restoring historical narratives to what they have perhapsalways already been: provoking and serious fantasies,convincing reconstructions, true fictions.”—Lucy Ives, The New Yorker “Danielle Dutton engagingly embellishes the life of Margaret the First, the infamousDuchess of Newcastle–upon–Tyne.” —Vanity Fair

Margaret Cavendish was one of the most original, loveable and eccentric of women writers. Pepys called her "mad, ridiculous, and conceited" but when she paid her famous visit to London in 1667 he ran all over town to see her. And many of her other contemporaries were no less fascinated. Posterity has continued to feel the attraction; to her many admirers she has always been "the incomparable Princess," and Lamb enthusiastically praised her as "the thrice noble, chase, and virtuous—but again somewhat fantastical, and original-brain'd, generous Margaret Newcastle." This biography is the first full-length study entirely devoted to the Duchess of Newcastle. It shows Margaret's metamorphosis from an imaginative, bashful child into a romantic public figure, and how, after living at home among a family unusual in its loyalties, she served as lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria during the Civil War and in exile married William Cavendish, the "Loyal" Duke of Newcastle, before emerging as the first woman writer of her times—"Margaret the First" as she wished to be known. Her poetry, fiction, drama and natural philosophy, along with her many other writings, are treated as facets of her extraordinary personality delightful in itself and also valuable as an illustration of the spirit of the age. The illustrations are unusually good and include a fine unpublished portrait of the Duchess, a photo of her effigy in Westminster Abbey and reproductions of several of the ornate engraved title-pages of her works.