NH: More or less what I guessed. The quotation from the antho is:
Straight she's fantastical, they all do cry,
But they will imitate her presently.
Which I took to mean, coming ironically from Cavendish's mouth, "well,
they all say I'm given to flights of fancy (and I did know that that would
be a negative comment -nh), but they'll be imitating me pretty soon."
-nh
On Tue, 8 Jul 1997, Michael Marc Levy wrote:
> 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
>
"Straight she's fantastical, they all do cry."
-Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle,
"Nature's Pictures," 1656
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