Carole Angier
Pomp Prodigy
Mad Madge: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Royalist, Writer and Romantic
By Katie Whitaker
Chatto & Windus 436pp £20 order from our bookshop
IT IS TO the credit of this serious and scholarly book that it fails to live down to its title. ‘Mad Madge’ was coined by nineteenth-century critics, Katie Whitaker tells us, and was unjust. It is a shame, then, that she uses it herself, and I can only think her publishers persuaded her.
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