MARGARET THE FIRST

MARGARET THE FIRST is on LitHub's Best Novels of the Decade list! (the very best novels written and published in English between 2010 and 2019.): "...glinting dagger of novel ... I would like this book to serve as representative evidence of all the short novels that might not be epic in length, but are so in scope..." Read more...

“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.”

"...a more elliptical cousin of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels. Its brief chapters cover years in mere paragraphs, and paint a collage-like portrait...Ms. Dutton’s style is tightly poetic. ”

Brilliant, ambitious, and apologetically aware that her world does not like women to be ambitious, Margaret is a perfect heroine for the 21st century... In Dutton's stained-glass prose, Margaret comes vividly to life.

Danielle Dutton's wonderfully strange 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!

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.

A slim, poetic meditation on the writing life...Woolf hovers over this brief novel, audible in its cadences and visible in its cascading images of nature, artistry, and oddity...this novel—more poem than biography—feels rooted in the experiences of contemporary women with artistic and intellectual ambitions. Margaret's alternating bursts of inspiration and despair about her work may feel achingly familiar to Dutton's likely readers, many of whom will probably also be aspiring writers.

Indebted to Virginia Woolf in both content and form, Dutton examines the life of a woman who upended social norms by being intelligent, imaginative, and ambitious without apology. Cavendish's intellectual and personal growth are explored with sensitivity in poetic prose style. This short literary book offers big rewards to readers interested in the complex mind of a woman ahead of her time.

Danielle Dutton’s slim, charming debut,Margaret the First, gives us a sympathetic account [of Margaret Cavendish’s life],largely from Cavendish’s own viewpoint … Colourful and full of flavour, with a style often as eccentric as its subject ... Dutton takes us briskly through Cavendish’s life in short scenes, free of the pastiche periodlanguage that hampers so many historical novels …Margaret the Firstleaves us wanting more, both of Cavendish’s life and [Dutton’s] writing. Read more...

AUS / UK: Scribe ; Poland: Wydawnictwo Kobiece

MARGARET THE FIRST has been on two *most anticipated books of 2016* lists (Flavorwire and The Millions) Read more...

Danielle Dutton's visceral and thought-provoking story Read more...

...This surprisingly relevant imagining of the life of Margaret Cavendish belongs next to Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own and Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper as important reflections on women’s inner life.

“The duchess herself would be delighted at her resurrection in Margaret the First…Dutton expertly captures the pathos of a woman whose happiness is furrowed with the anxiety of under acknowledgment…Dutton surprisingly and delightfully offers not just a remarkable character but also an intriguing dissection of an unusually bountiful partnership.”

Although Margaret the First is set in 17th century London, it's not a traditional work of historical fiction. It is an experimental novel that, like the works of Jeanette Winterson, draws on language and style to tell the story... There is a restless ambition to [Danielle Dutton's] intellect.

Margaret Cavendish (162373) did something that was vanishingly rare for women in 17th-century England: She became a famous writer...This is the story Danielle Dutton tells in her beguiling biographical novel Margaret the First... William, a poet and patron of the arts, encourages his wife's ambitions even as they bring notoriety upon the household... Ms. Dutton sensitively shows how Margaret's iconoclasm complicates, but ultimately enriches their relationship. 'A woman cannot strive to make known her wit without losing her reputation,' Margaret laments when told of the scandal her writing provokes. Yet this inimitable woman made her reputation anyway, and Ms. Dutton's novel charmingly enhances it.

This vivid novel is a dramatization of the life of 17th-century Duchess Margaret Cavendish, who wrote and published fantastical fiction and feminist plays well before it was acceptable for women to do so. Her literary ventures (and also perhaps the time that she appeared at the opera topless with painted nipples) earned her the title 'Mad Madge.' While the novel takes place in the 1600s, the explorations of marriage, ambition, and feminist ideals are timeless.

Dutton’s remarkable second novel is as vividly imaginative as its subject, the 17th-century English writer and eccentric Margaret Cavendish...this novel is indeed reminiscent of Woolf’s Orlando in its sensuous appreciation of the world and unconventional approach to fictionalized biography. Dutton’s boldness, striking prose, and skill at developing an idiosyncratic narrative should introduce her to the wider audience she deserves.

Dutton's work serves to emphasize the ambiguities of archival proof, restoring historical narratives to what they have perhaps always already been: provoking and serious fantasies, convincing reconstructions, true fictions.

With refreshing and idiosyncratic style, Dutton portrays the inner turmoil and eccentric genius of an intellectual far ahead of her time.

Danielle’s piece forThe Guardian on the wild women of literature. Read more...

I just finished Danielle Dutton’s Margaret the First, Catapult’s first spring 2016 title, and I can’t wait for it to get into everybody’s hands. It is the literary equivalent of an outrageously beautiful gown — it makes one slightly jealous, but seeing Dutton dispense such finery is such an overwhelming pleasure. Read more...

MARGARET THE FIRST received a nomination in the "Best Work of Experimental Literature (Film Editing)" category. Read more...

Conjured in a prose at once lush and spare - so precise and yet so rich in observation - Danielle Dutton's Margaret is a creature exquisitely of her own creation, who can tell herself, and perhaps believe, that she 'had rather appear worse in singularity, than better in the Mode.'