Margaret Cavendish's life as a writer and noblewoman unfolded against the backdrop of the English Civil War and Restoration. Pursuing the only career open to women of her class, she became a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Henrietta Maria. Exiled to Paris with the Queen, she met and married William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle. In exile, Margaret did something unthinkable for a seventeenth-century Englishwoman: she lived proudly as a writer. Eventually she published twenty-three volumes, starting with Poems and Fancies, the first book of English poetry published by a woman under her...

When Charles became involved in war with Puritan Scotland, popular hatred of Henrietta's Catholicism roused Parliament to fury. As the opposition party embraced new values of liberty and republicanism--the blueprint for the American War of Independence and the French Revolution--Charles's fears for his wife's safety drove him into a civil war that would cost him his crown and his head Rejecting centuries of hostile historical tradition, prize-winning biographer Katie Whitaker uses a host of original sources--including many unpublished manuscripts and letters--to create an intimate portrait of...

Born into an East Anglian royalist family in 1623, young Margaret Lucas went into Court service, accompanying the Queen, Henrietta Maria, to Oxford during the Civil War and sharing her hair-raising escape to France in 1644. This title tells us the story of Margaret Cavendish.