The Blazing World

A kidnapped young woman becomes empress of a world beyond the North Pole, sets bear-men and bird-men to do its science, and summons the author as her secretary.

by Margaret Cavendish160 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1666(aged 43)
Original language: English

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Overview

The American novelist Siri Hustvedt took this book's title for a novel in 2014, and Alan Moore, the comics writer, made its country a place his characters travel to in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The story they drew on first appeared in 1666 at the back of a treatise against the microscope, and it does in fiction what the treatise does in argument: it lets one woman's reason settle the science of a whole world. A merchant carries a young lady off by sea, a storm drives the ship to the North Pole, and the crew freeze to death. She alone passes into another world, joined to ours at the pole, where the stars blaze so brightly that night is as light as day. Its emperor marries her and hands her the government. She organises his subjects, who are part animal, into learned societies: the bear-men are her experimental philosophers and the bird-men her astronomers. When the bear-men turn their telescopes on the sky they cannot agree about what they see, and the Empress orders the glasses broken, relenting only when they beg to keep them. The targets are the Royal Society's experimenters, among them Robert Hooke, whose book of microscope pictures had come out the year before. Then Margaret Cavendish writes herself in. The Empress wants a scribe, and the soul she is sent is the Duchess of Newcastle's; the two become friends, and the Duchess, who wants an empire too, learns that anyone can make a world inside her own mind. In the second part the Empress goes home with a fleet to save her native country in a war. Cavendish explained that she had joined the story to her treatise as two worlds joined at their poles, and she reissued both in 1668. Dale Spender, the feminist scholar, called the story a forerunner of science fiction. Kate Lilley's edition of 1992 went into Penguin Classics in 1994, and a stage version played at Heidelberg in 2023.

Key concepts

What is the Blazing World?

It is a second world joined to ours at the North Pole, where the stars blaze so brightly that night is as light as day. Cavendish gives it what her own world lacked: one ruler, one religion, one language and no war. She calls it a world she made herself, since fortune would give her none to govern.

Who are the Bear-men, Bird-men and the others?

They are the inhabitants of the Blazing World, each kind walking upright with the features of an animal, and the Empress makes each a learned profession. Bear-men become experimental philosophers, Bird-men astronomers, Ape-men chemists, Fox-men politicians, Spider-men mathematicians. Through their reports and their quarrels Cavendish puts the sciences of her day before a single questioner.

What does it mean to create a world in the mind?

It means treating imagination as a kind of rule. Every human being, the spirits say, can make a world within the head, people it, govern it and change it at will, with none of the deaths that conquest costs. For Cavendish the claim is literal: an imagined world is framed by the rational parts of matter, which are the parts of her mind.

What are the immaterial spirits in the story?

They are bodiless beings the Empress summons to learn what her scholars cannot tell her, including news of the world she left. They can inform and dictate, but to act or write they must put on a body, as a man arms himself with a gauntlet of steel. They also correct the learned: what cabbalists take for immaterial spirits is the purest part of matter.

What are the romancical, philosophical and fantastical parts?

They are the three kinds of writing Cavendish says the story is made of. The first part is romancical, in the manner of a romance of adventure; the second is philosophical; the third is mere fancy, which she also calls fantastical. She wrote it as an appendix to a treatise, the two joined like worlds at their poles, and offers the fiction to readers who take no delight in arguments.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

An empress and her experimenters

What should a ruler do with learned men whose instruments make them disagree? The fiction gives the question to an empress with the power to break every glass in her world.

Once on the throne, the Empress sorts her half-animal subjects into learned societies and questions each in turn. The Bear-men, her experimental philosophers, look at the stars through telescopes and cannot agree what they see, so she calls the glasses false informers and orders them broken. They kneel and beg to keep them, confessing that they take more delight in artificial delusions than in natural truths, and she relents. Later the Duchess advises dissolving the societies altogether, because wherever learning is there is quarrelling, and a quiet government matters more than their reports.

natural philosophy
scientific instruments
scientific disagreement
technology
knowledge
epistemology
education
reason

Enter a dialogue

A world of one's own

Where can a woman with no kingdom be sovereign? The story answers twice: in a world reached by shipwreck and ruled absolutely, and in a world anyone may create inside her own head.

Power in the story is single and undivided: one emperor, one religion, one language, which is why the Blazing World knows no war. The Empress converts her subjects with two chapels, one lined with a stone that seems to burn when wet and one with star-stone that shines, and later saves her native country by burning enemy ships. The Duchess, summoned as her scribe, wants an empire as well, and the spirits tell her that every human being can create a world within the skull. The epilogue offers readers the same: be her subjects in imagination, or make worlds of their own.

imagination
political power
sovereignty
political authority
religion
war
imperialism
spirits
soul

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 160
distinct concepts: 309
by passages held, corpus-wide: #397

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “causation” and “natural philosophy”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 16 pairings. 94 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
causation	natural philosophy	6
natural philosophy	perception	4
political power	technology	3
cosmology	imagination	2
natural philosophy	technology	2
political power	religion	2
causation	cosmology	1
cosmology	natural philosophy	1
cosmology	perception	1
cosmology	political power	1
cosmology	religion	1
cosmology	technology	1
imagination	political power	1
natural philosophy	political power	1
perception	technology	1
religion	technology	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1655 Philosophical and Physical Opinions
Printed in London in 1655 while she lived in exile at Antwerp, this is her first full treatise on nature, and its opening part reprints Philosophical Fancies of 1653. Each of her later books on nature starts from the system laid out here.
EN
1664 Philosophical Letters
Letters to a fictional correspondent, published in 1664, a year after the enlarged second edition of Philosophical and Physical Opinions. Here she tests the system of that treatise, passage by passage, against four named authors and, in a last section, several more.
EN
1666 Observations upon Experimental Philosophy
Her direct reply to the Royal Society's experimental programme, and her longest argument about how nature can be known at all. It was issued in 1666 in one volume with The Blazing World and again in 1668.
EN
1666 The Blazing World you are here EN
1668 Grounds of Natural Philosophy
Her last statement of her system, published in 1668, five years before her death. It replaces Philosophical and Physical Opinions, leaves behind the polemics of the two books before it, and adds an appendix of speculations about other worlds.
EN

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