Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies (1653)

Reading the first edition of Poems and Fancies was a great experience. Browsing through the pages revealed annotations or doodles made by the original owners of the book which was fascinating to see. It was exciting to work with poems that few people had previously researched or studied.

Ultimately, I found that Cavendish’s poetry did not quite fit into the overall scheme of my dissertation. However, there was material in the preface to Poems and Fancies, which was much more relevant to the ideas I wanted to discuss. This led me to research her other writing, and I found that she had written several Philosophical texts in which she explicitly discussed Natural Philosophy. One of these, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), had several sections specifically about microscopical study which became an important part of my dissertation.

Copyright University of Leeds