Danielle Dutton + Stephen Sparks

Danielle Dutton, founder of Dorothy, a publishing project, will discuss Margaret the First with Green Apple’s book buyer, Stephen Sparks.

Praise for Margaret the First:

“Margaret the First is set in the seventeenth century, but don’t let that fool you. It’s a strikingly smart and daringly feminist novel with modern insights into love, marriage, and the siren call of ambition.” —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

“All this trouble for a girl,” say the bears in the book Margaret Cavendish writes within this remarkable book written by Danielle Dutton, the story of a very real woman at a very particular moment in history that is at the same time the story of every woman artist who has ever burst loose the constraints of her particular moment in history to create “a new world called the blazing world.” —Kathryn Davis, author of The Thin Place and Duplex

“Ever since I first encountered her writing, I’ve told every serious reader I know that Danielle Dutton is one of the most original and wonderfully weird prose stylists of our time, every bit the contemporary of Lydia Davis, Cesar Aira, and Diane Williams. How perfect that her new novel is a portrait of Margaret of Newcastle, whose perceived excesses and eccentricities were an object of fascination for her time, as well as for Virginia Woolf, who laments in A Room of One’s Own, ‘What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind!’ And what a visionary portrait Margaret the First is, not only for the sheer joy of the sentences, but also as it’s a marvel of tenderness, rewriting a historical caricature as a life, delighting in Margaret’s passion for writing and love of the beautiful and strange from childhood on. I am in awe of what Dutton accomplishes here, in this novel of the small and the sublime. What a triumph!”
—Kate Zambreno, author of Green Girl

About Margaret the First:

Margaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional 17th-century Duchess. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when being a writer was not an option open to women. As one of the Queen’s attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, she was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. As the English Civil War raged on, Margaret met and married William Cavendish, who encouraged her writing and her desire for a career. After the War, her work earned her both fame and infamy in England: at the dawn of daily newspapers, she was Mad Madge, an original tabloid celebrity. Yet Margaret was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of Londona mainstay of the Scientific Revolutionand the last for another two hundred years.
Margaret the First is very much a contemporary novel set in the past, rather than historical fiction. Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, it is a gorgeous and wholly new narrative approach to imagining the life of a historical woman.