<div>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 &quot;Mad Madge,&quot; in London, writing in his diary that &quot;The Duchess of Newcastle is all the pageant now discoursed on.&quot; 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.<br><br><i>Margaret the First</i> 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.</div>