The Blazing World and Other Writings

First published in 1666, “The Blazing World”, is both one of the first novels written in English and one of the earliest works of science fiction. This utopian classic, by Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, is also one of the earliest works by an English woman. Cavendish was an outspoken feminist, at a time when such ideas were virtually unheard of, and a pioneering advocate for a more modern view of gender roles and equality. “The Blazing World” is a surreal and experimental work that describes a fanciful and utopian society that may be reached through the North Pole. A young lady enters this new world and discovers a society full of various kinds of talking animals. She plans an invasion of her old world with the help of fish men, bird men, submarines, and weapons of flaming stone. Part travel memoir and part romance, “The Blazing World” is a wildly creative novel that imagines a world with entirely new ideas of gender, race, and class that were a radical departure from the norms of the seventeenth-century. Also included in this volume are two other works by Cavendish, “The Contract” and “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity”.