Abstract

Author Margaret Cavendish has often caused her readers’ incomprehension by writing about natural philosophy in genres otherthan the philosophical treatise – poetry, familiar letter, drama or fiction. Her romance, The Description of a New Blazing World (1666), originally published as an appendix to her Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, shows the influence of Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) – which was itself published together with Sylva sylvarum. The romance is most often studied independently from Cavendish’s philosophical work as a cosmic, feminist utopia; conversely, readers of her Observations tend to ignore its companion piece. Yet the romance offers a satirical version of the critique of experimental philosophy that Cavendish develops in Observations. She targets the fashion for optical instruments which had become all the rage among virtuosi around the Royal Society in the 1660s, with, as a result, the publication of volumes of microscopic observations by Henry Power and Robert Hooke respectively in 1664 and 1665. This article returns to Cavendish’s choice to append a fictional text to a treatise, to read the two texts as a diptych. What is the epistemological significance of this fusion, and what does it produce? What does fiction do that a didactic text cannot achieve? This essay looks in particular at her radical critique of Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), which is paraphrased and quoted at great length in Blazing World. It suggests that the novel provides an exegesis of Hooke and shows the author Cavendish at work, her strategies of selection and close reading at the service of satire. These passages also allow readers to better understand why Cavendish makes of her critique of observation the heart of her critique of experimental philosophy.