Of the many women whose intellectual powers were rendered ineffectual by a want of education, the Duchess of Newcastle is an outstanding example. Like other well-bred women, she had had her tutors, who were paid to give a semblance of schooling, but who were not even supposed to exact the discipline of study. A young lady could read, write and cipher, she could chatter a foreign language, dance, and play the virginals, embroider and make bead bags. In the name of common sense what more could any one expect? Let her carry her "education" as she would a handkerchief—in case she should need it. It were unnecessary, and indeed rather ill-bred to make great play with either or flourish them about. But Margaret Newcastle was haunted by a dual hunger—for knowledge and for fame. She wanted to know "whether it be possible to make men and other Animal creatures that naturally have no wings, flie as birds do?" "Whether the Optick Perception is made in the Eye or Brain, or in both?" "Whether there could be self-knowledge without Perception?" "Whether snails have a row of small teeth orderly placed in the gums"? Such knowledge was not forthcoming, and the undisciplined and voracious mind raced on to other fields of enquiry. There was not time enough in eternity to know all she wished to know, or to write all she felt impelled to write. She writes so fast that she cannot stay to form the letters properly. She never revises. She fills twelve folio volumes, and the more she writes the more her readers tap their foreheads significantly, and rock with laughter. She knows, but she does not care. If writing is a disease, then countless great men have been at death's door. "All I desire is fame," she says; and again: "I have an Opinion, which troubles me like a conscience, that 'tis a part of Honour to aspire to Fame."

As for Learning, that I am not versed in it, no body, I hope, will blame me for it, since it is sufficiently known, that our Sex is not bred up to it, as being not suffer'd to be instructed in Schools and Universities; I will not say, but many of our Sex may have as much Wit, and be capable of Learning as well as Men; but since they want Instructions, it is not possible they should attain to it; for Learning is Artificial, but Wit is Natural.

Writing over two centuries later, Sir Egerton Brydges says [in his preface to A True Relation of the Birth, Breeding and Life of Margaret Newcastle, Duchess of Newcastle, 1872]:

That the Duchess was deficient in a cultivated judgment; that her knowledge was more multifarious than exact; and that her powers of fancy and sentiment were more active than her powers of reasoning, I will admit; but that her productions mingled as they are with great absurdities, are wanting either in talent, or in virtue, or even in genius, I cannot concede.

[In his Curiosities of Literature, 1849, Isaac] Disraeli supports the same view:

Her labours have been ridiculed by some wits, but had her studies been regulated she would have displayed no ordinary genius … Her verses have been imitated even by Milton.

And finally in the following criticism [from The Cavalier and his Lady, 1872] we find the same judgment more fully expressed:

There are [in the writings of the Duchess] the indisputable evidences of a genius as highborn in the realms of intellect as its possessor was in the ranks of society: a genius strong-winged and swift, fertile and comprehensive, but ruined by deficient culture, by literary dissipation and the absence of two powers without which thoughts are only stray morsels of strength, I mean Concatenation and the Sense of Proportion. She thought without system, and set down everything she thought. Her fancy turning round like a kaleidoscope changed its patterns and lines with the most whimsical variety and rapidity. Nevertheless, I believe, had the mind of this woman been disciplined and exercised by early culture and study, it would have stood out remarkable among the feminine intellects of our history.

Happily, however, two of the Duchess of Newcastle's works are free from those fixed ideas and exaggerated fancies which distort her other writings. These are the two biographical works which we are about to consider. In them, the turgid current of her thought flows clearly and surely to the end she had in view.

In 1656, appeared Natures Pictures drawn by Fancie's Pencil… which contained, as the eleventh and last book The True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life. It preserves, as all autobiographies should, the quintessence of the writer's individuality.

Anne Clifford had presented a chain of events with few comments [in her autobiography]. Margaret Newcastle presents thoughts in which events are caught like flies in amber. She does not lose her way in the tangled happenings of her career, because external events never constituted her life. Life to her was thought. Well might she say: "I have made a world of my own." Out of the press and hurry of the years she gathered something timeless—a conception of values which took its nature from her own personality. She might have been embittered by her misfortunes, intoxicated by her powers of endurance, made querulous by her poverty, or disillusioned by that spiritual weariness which always follows the triumph of a political cause. But she had an inner existence against which the tide of external events beat in vain. She does not particularise her backgrounds, and yet she gives sufficient to convey a feeling of vivid intimacy. The depth of her judgments, the unpretentious sincerity of her story and the steady undercurrent of emotion which carries it onward give this biography an unforgettable pathos and beauty.

In 1667, the Duchess published The Life of the Thrice noble, high and puissant Prince, William Cavendish, Duke … of Newcastle, a book "both good and rare" for which, says [Charles Lamb in Last Essays of Elia], "no binding is too good: no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honour and keep safe such a jewel."…

There have been diverse opinions as to these biographical works of the Duchess. [Samuel] Pepys was very forthright in his condemnation. On March 18th, 1667, he writes [in his diary]: "Staid at home reading the ridiculous History of my Lord Newcastle, wrote by his wife; which shows her to be a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman, and he an asse to suffer her to write what she writes to him and of him. So to bed my eyes being very bad."

His myopia, however, was nothing to that of Horace Walpole [A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, 1759], who fulminates against the Newcastles "with less taste and justice than are commonly to be found in his censures, and with more than his usual spleen," [according to Edmund Lodge in his Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain, 1835]. Disraeli dismisses as mere levity Walpole's criticism which in brief is as follows:

Of all the riders of [Pegasus] perhaps there have not been a more fantastic couple than his Grace and his faithful Duchess, who was never off her pillion. One of the noble Historian's finest portraits is of the Duke: The Duchess has left another; more diffuse indeed but not less entertaining. It is equally amusing to hear her sometimes compare her Lord to Julius Caesar, and often to acquaint you with such anecdotes as in what sort of coach he went to Amsterdam.

Having jeered at the Duchess's claims to genius and at her peculiarities, he ends thus:

What a picture of foolish nobility was this stately poetic couple, retired to their own little domain, and intoxicating one another with circumstantial flattery on what was of consequence to no mortal but themselves.

And what a picture of finicking celibacy was Walpole himself, retired into his little pseudo-Gothic stronghold at Strawberry Hill, surrounded by an arid collection of artistic curiosities, and drawing his life-breath from the sterile eulogies of his select coterie! Whereas the Newcastles left a memory of faithful love, this doyen left a miasma of malicious preciosity. Before he sneered at Margaret Newcastle's literary absurdities, he should have wiped the bloody drop from Alfonso's nose. Before he stigmatised a childless woman as a "fertile pedant," he should have considered for a moment his own barren existence.

Happily, however, there have been few such critics. The general consensus of opinion has always emphasised the profound value of The True Relation and the Life of William Cavendish. To the worth of the latter biography, Firth has finely testified [in the preface to the Life of William Cavendish, 1886]:

The special interest of the book lies in the picture of the exiled Royalist, cheerfully sacrificing everything for the King's cause, struggling with his debts, talking over his creditors, never losing confidence in the ultimate triumph of the right, and on his return, setting to work uncomplainingly to restore his ruined estate. It lies … in the portrait drawn of a great English nobleman of the seventeenth century; his manners and his habits, his domestic policy, and his alliances with neighbouring potentates, all are recorded and set down with the loving fidelity of a Boswell.