Abstract

In the mid-seventeenth century, while in exile as a royalist during the English Civil War, Margaret Cavendish wrote a book of poems that she entitled Poems and Fancies (along with a slightly later companion volume called Philosophical Fancies). Poems and Fancies, printed in London in 1653 while she was back in England advocating for her exiled husband, covered topics as various as the atomic makeup of the world; ethics and empathy with the non-human world; the cognitive possibilities of poetic and allegorical modes; the importance of making mental room for the supernatural; and the ravages of war on a nation and on individual minds. A second, much-revised edition was printed in 1664, and this revised edition was reprinted again in 1668, five years before her death. This digital scholarly edition, produced by Liza Blake with thirteen undergraduate editorial collaborators, makes this remarkable collection of poems freely available online, fully collated, edited, and modernized. This edition has two central aims. First, it makes the poetry of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, freely available online in a scholarly edition for all to use, in teaching or for research. More importantly, it contains full textual notes noting all textual variants across the three editions. As is explained in more detail in the Textual and Editorial Introduction, Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies has a complicated textual history; between the first and second editions of the book in 1653 and 1664, respectively, she made numerous textual changes, including fixes to meter and rhyme, rewrites of lines and couplets, and in some cases, significant rearrangements of materials. This edition, based on a thorough textual and bibliographical study of her poems, offers the first fully collated edition of her poems, allowing readers to track and study those numerous changes, and to close read with those changes in mind.