Recent Developments in the Study of Seventeenth‐Century Literature and Three Papers from the 2007 Margaret Cavendish Conference
Authors: Fitzmaurice James 
Published: February 2008

This paper introduces a Literature Compass cluster on Margaret Cavendish. The full cluster is made up of the following articles:

‘Recent Developments in the Study of Seventeenth‐Century Literature and Three Papers from the 2007 Margaret Cavendish Conference’, James Fitzmaurice, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00523.x.

‘Filling in the Picture: Contexts and Contacts of Jane Cavendish’, Alexandra G. Bennett, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00524.x.

‘Mrs. Dalloway and the Duchess: Virginia Woolf Reads and Writes Margaret Cavendish’, Lise Mae Schlosser, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00525.x.  ‘From Drama to Science: Margaret Cavendish as Vanishing Mediator’, John Shanahan, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00526.x.

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The first paper, by Alexandra Bennett, points up the importance of manuscript work to recent Cavendish studies and concerns itself with the poetry of Jane Cavendish, stepdaughter to Margaret. One poem examined by Bennett involves Jane's response to verses by John Suckling on the subject of Lady Alice Egerton, Jane's sister‐in‐law. ‘Jane paints a decidedly more complex picture of gender relations in her verse than he does’, writes Bennett. Whatever the case with the quality of the poetry, Bennett, as one might expect of a serious archival scholar, freely admits that Jane's manuscript poetry is full of addressees who ‘will never be known: far too many poems in these collections are titled “On an Acquaintance” (5 poems), “On a Noble Lady” (5 poems), “On an honourable Lady,” or “On a Worthy friend” ’.

The second paper, that by Lise Schlosser, is situated within the emerging or re‐emerging field of reception history and focuses on Mrs. Dalloway. Schlosser explains that Virginia Woolf's acerbic and trivializing remarks about Cavendish are routinely used by Cavendish scholars in introductions to essays but asserts that Woolf may have admired qualities of diffuseness in the writing of Cavendish, qualities that are to be found in Woolf's own writing. Woolf, of course, was acerbic and trivializing about the likes of Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. Schlosser, it is interesting to note, uses a research method that is not widespread but one that we might expect to become more prevalent in the future. She conducts searches by making use of a CD ROM of the Woolf oeuvre and she explores Cavendish using Brown University's Renaissance Women Online (RWO).

John Shanahan's paper, the third and last, combines a study of Cavendish's scientific thought with a broader consideration of science as public performance. Shanahan invokes Steven Shapin's work on the development of laboratory space from converted kitchens to purpose‐built rooms while drawing on or making reference to performance history. Shanahan is only marginally interested in imaginative literature and focuses on what he calls ‘forensics’, by which he means oral presentation as found in lectures and in rhetorical display of a scientific sort. He finds Cavendish to be one of the last unabashed purveyors of science as theater, while at the same time agreeing that science never completely escapes from theater no matter how hard it tries.