A new, beautifully laid-out edition of Margaret Cavendish's 1666 novel -- a classic of early modern utopian literature. Blazing World is the story of a satirical, utopian kingdom in another world that can be reached via the North Pole and a young woman who enters this other world, becomes empress of a society of talking animals, and organizes an invasion back into her home world.

The Blazing World (illustrated)The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World, better known as The Blazing World, is a 1666 work of prose fiction by English writer Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. It has been described as an early forerunner of science fiction.The Blazing World / The Blazing World Book /The Blazing World ebook/The Blazing World kindle Book / The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish / the blazing world and other writings / the blazing world margaret

Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious, Margaret Cavendish was one of the seventeenth century's most striking figures: a woman who ventured into the male spheres of politics, science, philosophy and literature. The Blazing World is a highly original work: part Utopian fiction, part feminist text, it tells of a lady shipwrecked on the Blazing World where she is made Empress and uses her power to ensure that it is free of war, religious division and unfair sexual discrimination. This volume also includes The Contract, a romance in which love and law work harmoniously together, and Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, which explores the power and freedom a woman can achieve in the disguise of a man.

The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World, better known as The Blazing World, is a 1666 work of prose fiction by the English writer Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. Feminist critic Dale Spender calls it a forerunner of science fiction. It can also be read as a utopian work.

The Blazing World, is a 1666 work of prose fiction by the English writer Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. Feminist critic Dale Spender calls it a forerunner of science fiction. It can also be read as a utopian work

Margaret Cavendish was one of the most original, loveable and eccentric of women writers. Pepys called her "mad, ridiculous, and conceited" but when she paid her famous visit to London in 1667 he ran all over town to see her. And many of her other contemporaries were no less fascinated. Posterity has continued to feel the attraction; to her many admirers she has always been "the incomparable Princess," and Lamb enthusiastically praised her as "the thrice noble, chase, and virtuous—but again somewhat fantastical, and original-brain'd, generous Margaret Newcastle." This biography is the first full-length study entirely devoted to the Duchess of Newcastle. It shows Margaret's metamorphosis from an imaginative, bashful child into a romantic public figure, and how, after living at home among a family unusual in its loyalties, she served as lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria during the Civil War and in exile married William Cavendish, the "Loyal" Duke of Newcastle, before emerging as the first woman writer of her times—"Margaret the First" as she wished to be known. Her poetry, fiction, drama and natural philosophy, along with her many other writings, are treated as facets of her extraordinary personality delightful in itself and also valuable as an illustration of the spirit of the age. The illustrations are unusually good and include a fine unpublished portrait of the Duchess, a photo of her effigy in Westminster Abbey and reproductions of several of the ornate engraved title-pages of her works.

The story begins when a beautiful, unnamed maiden is kidnapped by a love-stricken merchant and his men. She is seized from the shore of her homeland and carried out to sea. While they are sailing, a tempest forces the boat to move towards the North Pole, and as the tempest rages on, she is saved "by Providence" and separated from her captors. The merchant's boat floats off into the Atlantic Ocean and the men freeze to death as the maiden, in a lifeboat, drifts into another world that is attached to Earth via the North Pole.She passes through the pole to discover an icy, strange world in which different suns gloriously shine; the new, strange, and wonderful qualities of the blazing light emanate from these stars to create an alternative space and time. The maiden has entered a new kingdom, called Blazing World.While in this new world, the maiden is enthroned as Empress of an extremely diverse society. The society of Blazing World is comprised of all different sorts of unrecognizable men: bird-men, fish-men, bear-men, mermen, lice-men, creatures of green, black, tawny, and even purple complexions. The Empress proceeds to assign each of the different types of men different occupations and obligations. The bird-men then become astronomers, the bear-men experimental philosophers, the spider-men as mathematicians, ape-men as chemists, and worm-, fish-, and fly-men as natural philosophers.She uses her power to ensure that her newly endowed land is free of war, religious diversion, and unfair sexual discrimination.