On Tue, 8 Jul 1997, Nalo Hopkinson wrote:
> NH: Oh, goody. Then maybe you can explain my sig file to the person on
> this list (sorry; don't have your name in front of me, and am not adept
> enough at e-mail to move between files) who asked me what it meant. I am
> no expert in English of the period and my dad, who was, is dead. I only
> have a vague, intuitive sense of its meaning. Only heard of Margaret
> Cavendish a few days ago, when Helen Merrick--lurking on this list--sent
> me a copy of _She's Fantastical,- an antho of sf by Australian women.
> Have to find out more about Cavendish when I surface from Tiptree reading.
>
> -nalo
>
> "Straight she's fantastical, they all do cry."
> -Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle,
> "Nature's Pictures," 1656
My own research into Cavendish is some 17 years old and I'm not at all
sure what's been written about her since the late 1970s and early 80s,
but I can dig out my old dissertation notes and give you a short
bibliography if you'd like.
At least as of 1980 very little had been written about her and much
of that was negative. Seems to me that there was a biography in the mid
1950s, however, and Virginia Wolfe said some interesting things about her
as well. In general the Duchess of Newcastle, like most intelligent but
poorly educated women of the period, was treated by her male
contemporaries as a witty, but not entirely sane eccentric, someone to
listen to because her husband was one of the most important men in
England, but certainly not someone to take very seriously.
As far as your sig file goes, I don't remember "Nature's Pictures" well
enough to be sure and the nearest copy of the work is probably 90
miles away in the University of Minnesota library stacks. If you've got
a longer quotation from the poem I might be able to tell you more--but I'm going
to guess that "straight" here means "immediately." In all probability
"fantastical" here means something considerably different from what might be meant
by the modern phrase "she's fantastic" ie. "wonderful." Nor would I guess that
it's meant the way the editors of the Australian anthology used it, as in "she's
imaginative." I'd guess, instead that it means something more like "hysterical"
(ie. `out of control' rather than `funny') or "given to flights of exaggerated
fantasy" and that it's not a very positive statement.
In other words, to translate the quote into modern English, I'd guess it
means:
Immediately she's hysterical. All women cry when you pressure them.
Not exactly what you'd want as your sig file, I'd guess, but I'd also
guess that Cavendish is probably writing this ironically, having
herself been dismissed in this way on other occasions.
This is all just a guess, of course.
Mike Levy
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