Margaret Cavendish

The Blazing World "Annotated" Margaret Cavendish

The story begins when a beautiful, unnamed maiden is kidnapped by a love-stricken merchant and his men. She is seized from the shore of her homeland and carried out to sea. While they are sailing, a tempest forces the boat to move towards the North Pole, and as the tempest rages on, she is saved "by Providence" and separated from her captors. The merchant's boat floats off into the Atlantic Ocean and the men freeze to death as the maiden, in a lifeboat, drifts into another world that is attached to Earth via the North Pole. She passes through the pole to discover an icy, strange world in which different suns gloriously shine; the new, strange, and wonderful qualities of the blazing light emanate from these stars to create an alternative space and time. The maiden has entered a new kingdom, called Blazing World. While in this new world, the maiden is enthroned as Empress of an extremely diverse society. The society of Blazing World is comprised of all different sorts of unrecognizable men: bird-men, fish-men, bear-men, mermen, lice-men, creatures of green, black, tawny, and even purple complexions. The Empress proceeds to assign each of the different types of men different occupations and obligations. The bird-men then become astronomers, the bear-men experimental philosophers, the spider-men as mathematicians, ape-men as chemists, and worm-, fish-, and fly-men as natural philosophers. She us