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It was, from the start, a dangerous experiment. Charles I of
England was a Protestant, the fifteen-year-old French princess a
Catholic. The marriage was arranged for political purposes, and it
seemed a mismatch of personalities. But against the odds, the
reserved king and his naively vivacious bride fell passionately in
love, and for ten years England enjoyed an era of peace and
prosperity. When Charles became involved in war with Puritan
Scotland, popular hatred of Henrietta's Catholicism roused
Parliament to fury. As the opposition party embraced new values of
liberty and republicanism--the blueprint for the American War of
Independence and the French Revolution--Charles's fears for his
wife's safety drove him into a civil war that would cost him his
crown and his head. Rejecting centuries of hostile historical
tradition, prize-winning biographer Katie Whitaker uses a host of
original sources--including many unpublished manuscripts and
letters--to create an intimate portrait of a remarkable marriage.
Margaret Cavendish's life as a writer and noblewoman unfolded
against the backdrop of the English Civil War and Restoration.
Pursuing the only career open to women of her class, she became a
lady-in-waiting to the Queen Henrietta Maria. Exiled to Paris with
the Queen, she met and married William Cavendish, Marquis of
Newcastle. In exile, Margaret did something unthinkable for a
seventeenth-century Englishwoman: she lived proudly as a writer.
Eventually she published twenty-three volumes, starting with "Poems
and Fancies," the first book of English poetry published by a woman
under her own name. But later generations too easily accepted the
disparaging opinions of her shocked critics, and labeled her "Mad
Madge of Newcastle.""Mad Madge" is both a lively biography of a
fascinating woman and a window on a tumultuous cultural time.
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