"For Want of Well Reading": Reading and Misreading in Margaret Cavendish's Sociable Letters

Margaret Cavendish’s (1623-1673) texts convey a constant anxiety between her desire to assert her authority and her understanding that legitimacy would come only if she could garner readers with authority. This anxiety was often expressed as a crippling fear over the inevitability of readers misreading her texts. Her certainty that she would be misread represented a “Danger and Disreputation” so egregious to her that she often described the impact of being misunderstood as physically threatening. In an effort to control how readers would read her texts, Cavendish used several methods (that she would later be criticized for) such as repeatedly prefacing and explaining her texts. The most interesting result of her efforts was a textual presence that became, as I will show, textually liberating on one level and dramatically controlling of her reader on another. In this paper, I explore several examples from Cavendish’s CCXI Sociable Letters (1664) demonstrating this exchange which Cavendish adamantly defined along gender lines. Cavendish divided readers according to their ability to read her as she wished to be read, described the ideal reading process and the failure of readers, in painstaking detail. Her identity was tightly bound to her self-image as an author and, most vividly, in the unparalleled intimacy of her language. For Cavendish, there was no distinction between her Self and her Text and this certainty allowed her a “presence” in her reader’s lives through which she could demonstrate not only the powerful potential reading afforded, but the requirement of reading well if one wished to access her texts, as I will show.