{"id":8798,"date":"2016-12-16T18:25:47","date_gmt":"2016-12-16T23:25:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=8798"},"modified":"2016-12-16T18:25:47","modified_gmt":"2016-12-16T23:25:47","slug":"margaret-the-first-by-danielle-duttoncatapult-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/margaret-the-first-by-danielle-duttoncatapult-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Margaret the First by Danielle DuttonCatapult, 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

As this New Yorker blog post by Lucy Ives points out<\/a>, Margaret the First<\/i> by Danielle Dutton is not exactly “conventional” historical fiction: it’s not full of “period intrigue,” to use Ives’s phrase, and it’s not particularly plot-driven or even, necessarily, character-driven, though the book does have a pretty tight focus on its title character, Margaret Cavendish, and there are historical events in it—Margaret finds herself in exile for chunks of her life\/the book, since she and her family and her husband were all Royalists, and part of the book takes place during Cromwell’s rise. It felt more atmosphere-driven, which generally works for me, though here I found it worked better in the first-person narrative of the first half of the book. <\/p>\n

I wasn’t familiar with Cavendish before picking this book up: she was born in 1623 and was a published writer in a time\/place where women really weren’t, and this book gives the sense of her as a writer from childhood on, a sense of her as someone who couldn’t keep from writing, who was happiest writing and publishing, even when people around her didn’t necessarily think she should. Early in the book we hear Margaret’s mother: “you must not spend all your time writing little books” (14). Later, a doctor: “Her ladyship’s occupation in writing of books is absolutely bad for health!” (73). On the reception of her first book: “Some readers were cross a lady had published at all, others that she had written of vacuums and war, rather than poems of love” (69). “It seemed impossible to make myself be any way but wrong,” Margaret thinks to herself, as a teenager (17). But she seems to become, if not more comfortable with herself as she gets older, more comfortable doing what she wants\/needs to. <\/p>\n

There are so so many beautiful images and phrases and descriptions in this book: “A current of wet Parisians passed outside the glass,” or “In spring, at the ballet: a spectacle of satin” (34, 40). Houses “lit like lanterns,” or “lindens and canals and savage-looking orchards,” or “the barges on the Thames: onions going down to sea, timber coming up” (47, 50, 99). I want to know if Danielle Dutton’s other books are similarly lovely, because if yes, I definitely want to read them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As this New Yorker blog post by Lucy Ives points out, Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton is not exactly “conventional” historical fiction: it’s not full of “period intrigue,” to use Ives’s phrase, and it’s not particularly plot-driven or even, necessarily, character-driven, though the book does have a pretty tight focus on its title character, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8798\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}