The Woman Who Wrote the Future

Margaret Cavendish published twenty-one books of philosophy, poetry, and science under her own name in an age when most women writers published under none at all. She wrote the first critical essay on Shakespeare. She sat in on salons with Hobbes and Descartes — then published critiques of both.

In 1666, she also wrote one of the earliest works of science fiction, a full 152 years before Frankenstein.

She designed her own clothes, which scandalized London so thoroughly that Samuel Pepys could barely write about anything else. She reportedly rode through the city in a coach pulled by eight white bulls. She attended the theater in a dress cut so low that one observer noted her breasts were "all laid out to view," accessorized with what the same account delicately described as "scarlet trimmed nipples." Pepys huffed that "all the town-talk is now-a-days of her extravagancies."

On May 30, 1667, she arrived at the Royal Society — the first woman ever to attend. The Fellows showed her experiments with air pressure and color mixing. She critiqued their methods to their faces.

They called her Mad Madge. They cited her eccentricity as reason enough to keep every woman out after her.

The ban held for 278 years.

She had been right about the science fiction, though. She had written a world that didn't exist yet.