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James Fitzmaurice, ed. Sociable Letters: Margaret Cavendish. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004. 336 pp. + 6 illus. $12.95.
Margaret Cavendish published thirteen books that went through twenty-two editions in her lifetime. She employed a surprisingly wide variety of genres for any seventeenth-century English writer, including poetry, fiction, autobiography, plays, scientific speculation, a biography of her husband, William Cavendish, and letters. Until recently, Cavendish's works had not been available in modern editions except C. H. Firth's edition of The Life of William Cavendish, to which is added the True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life, which appeared in 1886 followed by later editions, and Douglas Grant's 1956 edition of letters written by William Cavendish and Margaret Lucas. Sociable Letters was the first of Cavendish's works to appear in a modern edition, reproduced as it was in a facsimile edition by Scholar Press in 1969. Scholar Press also reproduced the first edition of Poems and Fancies in 1972. Other than excerpts appearing in anthologies, no other works by Cavendish appeared in modern editions until Paul Salzman's edition of The Blazing World in An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction published in 1991 and Kate Lilley's 1992 edition of The Blazing World and Other Writings.
James Fitzmaurice did Cavendish scholars a great service by editing Sociable Letters for publication by Garland in 1997. Fitzmaurice's most recent Broadview edition of Sociable Letters is even more valuable because it situates the letters in context by providing a full introduction, appendices, illustrations, and annotations. The Broadview Editions series for which this edition was prepared brings together valuable newly-accessible texts with canonical texts, helpful introductions, and a variety of contemporary documents that set the lesser-known literature in context Fitzmaurice's edition of Sociable Letters will help today's readers become the audience of "after ages" that Cavendish ardently desired.
Sociable Letters imitates the numerous epistolary relationships between men and women based upon ongoing philosophical or theological discussions; however, it models an exchange between two women instead of one between a male author...