Margaret the First

As one of the queen's attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, Margaret Lucas was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. While the English Civil War raged on, she met and married William Cavendish, an aristocratic landowner and poet. He encouraged both her writing and her desire for a career--a singular relationship at the time. After Cromwell's defeat, Margaret and William returned to England, where her work, behavior, and sense of style--including once attending the theater in a topless gown-- earned her both fame and infamy. A curious Samuel Pepys kept an eye out for "Mad Madge," in London, writing in his diary that "The Duchess of Newcastle is all the pageant now discoursed on." At the dawn of daily newspapers, she was a tabloid celebrity, yet she was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of London--a mainstay of the Scientific Revolution--and the last for another two hundred years.

Margaret the First is an intimate story of woman whose modern sensibility was out of step with her times, one whose work as a philosopher has recently drawn the attention of the academy. Stylistically quick, with sharp cuts through narrative time, the novel also revels in the physicality of a garden or a landscape, and turns tender in its rendering of family and marital ties.

Danielle Dutton’s fiction has appeared in magazines such as Harper’s,BOMB, Fence, and Noon. She is the author of a collection of hybrid prose pieces,Attempts at a Life, which Daniel Handler in Entertainment Weekly called indescribably beautiful,” and an experimental novel,S P R A W L, a finalist for the Believer Book Award. In 2015, she wrote the texts forHere Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera, an artists’ book with collages by Richard Kraft.

Dutton holds a PhD in Literature and Writing from the University of Denver, an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in History from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Prior to her current position on the creative writing faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, she taught in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa and was the book designer at Dalkey Archive Press.

In 2010, Dutton founded the small press Dorothy, a publishing project, named for her great aunt Dorothy Traver, a librarian who drove a bookmobile through the back hills of southern California. Now in its fifth year, the press’s books are widely reviewed. The press itself has been praised in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, and Dutton has been interviewed in theParis Review, Kirkus, and elsewhere for her work promoting innovative women writers.