Margaret Cavendish

(1623 - 1673)

A Royalist who went into exile during the English Civil War, Margaret Cavendish moved back to England after the Restoration began in 1660, having already made a name as an outré writer. The Blazing World, published in 1666, is both a romance novel and a precursor to modern science fiction stories. “There is something noble and quixotic and high-spirited,” Virginia Woolf wrote about Cavendish in The Common Reader, “as well as crack-brained and bird-witted about her.”