The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World

First published in 1666, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’s Description of a New Blazing World is the first fictional portrayal of women and the new science. InBlazing World, Cavendish depicts her heroine, the Empress, in multiple roles. The Empress is leader of a dreamlike utopian world reachable through the North Pole, filled with talking animals and intelligent hybrid creatures. She establishes a royal society of scientists, initiates learned conferences, interrogates existing knowledge, and spends her days speculating on natural philosophy. She also forms a lively intellectual collaboration with the “Duchess of Newcastle,” a female character summoned from Earth. A companion volume to Cavendish’s important Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, Blazing World is the first known science fiction novel to have been written and published by a woman, and represents a pioneering female scientific utopia.

This Broadview Edition includes related historical materials on the new science and Cavendish’s role in the intellectual world of her time.

Sara Mendelson teaches in the Arts and Science program at McMaster University. She is the co-editor, with the late Sylvia Bowerbank, of Broadview’sPaper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader.