“The Imperfect Lens: The Self in Sociable Letters, The Blazing World, and Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.”

Margaret Cavendish maintains an absent presence in her text through her elaborate prefaces and textual intrusions, but also through a constant conflation of “self” and text, or, as she describes it, the “paper bodies” that find her suffering the same fate as a manuscript lost at sea (Sociable Letters, letter 143). In this paper, I explore how this tendency represents Cavendish’s desire to prepare her readers for the unconventional language and forms they would discover and how it simultaneously reveals a desperate need to control her readers’ experience of her textual worlds. I consider examples from CCXI Sociable Letters (1664) and The Blazing World (1666) to illustrate Cavendish’s deliberate design of this absent presence. I also consider Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier (2008) and its use of her Blazing World as a poignant example of Cavendish literary legacy in which self and text are finally fused so utterly that her “self” is lost to the textual world she refused to detach herself from.