Lucy Hutchinson’s and Margaret Cavendish’s Petitionary Lives

Abstract

Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson used similar generic strategies, borrowed from the mid-century petition, when composing biographies of their husbands, The Life of William Cavendish and Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. While both authors use their prefaces to frame their biographies as dispassionate recitations of historical fact, rather than defending a purely documentary regime, such pronouncements obliquely prompt readers to search for deviations from the authors’ biographic agendas. This essay will argue that Cavendish and Hutchinson used the biographies of their husbands to disguise and promote political critiques that ultimately reveal the autocratic impulses of Charles II in the early years of the Restoration. Such critiques, I propose, are grounded in the complementary self-presentations of the authors. Informed by their common experience as petitioners of unfriendly bureaucracies, Cavendish and Hutchinson style themselves as advocates for constitutional monarchy and particularly the preservation of rights and privileges due to English citizens. Finally, by examining the intersection of biography and autobiography, petition and legal testimony, this essay challenges the scholarly tendency to assign highly gendered critical frameworks to Memoirs and Life of William, which are more likely to be described as wifely romances than as political treatises. [L.D.F.]