Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies: Epistemic Agency in the War Writing of Brilliana Harley and Margaret Cavendish Joanne H

Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2009, vol. 4

Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies: Epistemic Agency in the War Writing of Brilliana Harley and Margaret Cavendish Joanne H. Wright

ritish women’s writings in response to the First World War have gen- Berated a great deal of scholarly inquiry, such that it is possible both to refer to a category of women war writers, and to break that category down into multiple genres and ideological approaches.1 Where might an investigation of women’s war writing during the English Civil War begin? Certainly the Civil War occasioned an increase in women’s public, political activity, including an increase in the publication of political tracts by women.2 Many of the women writing explicitly political tracts and peti- tions combined religious and political arguments, taking exception to specific policies or registering their pleas for the release of male family members from prison. Stepping aside from the pamphlet literature, is it possible to create a distinct category of women’s war writing, writing by women that directly engages the politics of war, its causes and meanings, and that reflects upon the lived experience of war? In this essay I approach this question by considering the constraints on our thinking about women as political thinkers and particularly war writers, and the failure of historians of political thought and military historians alike to acknowledge women’s perspectives on war. I suggest that an investigation of women Civil War writers might fruitfully begin with an examination of the writings of Brilliana Harley and Margaret Cavendish, both of whom served as valuable historical witnesses to the English Civil War and, even more importantly, attempted to construct political

1 2 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Joanne H. Wright

knowledge of it. In terms of political sympathies, Harley, as a supporter of Parliament, and Cavendish, as a Royalist (albeit an ambiguous one3), would have shared little. Yet they each had to negotiate difficult epistemological terrain to assert their knowledge claims about war, terrain marked by deeply ingrained assumptions about their gender, their status as gentle- women or nobility, as well as their lack of authority in the field of war. Brilliana’s letters about the impending military siege of Brampton Bryan, together with Cavendish’s multiple narratives and stories of war, particularly in Orations of Divers Sorts (1662), Bell in Campo (1662), and Sociable Letters (1664), make possible an alternative kind of knowledge about war that is not available in either the traditional military history or the political theory of the Civil War period. Placing the narratives of Harley and Cavendish at the center of this inquiry allows us to disrupt the dominant, phallocentric picture of the Civil War, while at the same time giving sub- stantive meaning to an early modern category of women war writers.

Phallocentric perspectives: surveying the military history of the Civil War

In thinking about women political writers and war writers in the seventeenth century, the challenge is not so much that no women were writing on war but that scant attention has been paid to this aspect of their writings. Most importantly for my purposes, even less attention has been paid to women writers’ knowledge of war and politics. In the light of these deficiencies, how do we begin to think of women as having authoritative knowledge about war? To begin to shift our thinking about women’s knowledge of war, it is necessary to address some of our basic assumptions about how women’s texts fit into both the larger societal conversation about war and what kinds of responses their writings engender. Quentin Skinner’s introductory comments in his examination of Thomas Hobbes’s use of the concept of representation are helpful in this regard. Skinner clarifies that his consideration of other relevant contem- porary uses of the idea of representation is not about “providing mere ‘background’ to the understanding of Hobbes’s thought.” In fact, he is Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies 3

attempting to “question any strong distinction between the background of partisan political tracts on the one hand and Hobbes’s systematic works of political philosophy on the other.”4 This is a point which holds particular significance for scholars interested in women’s intellectual history, that the traditional positioning of great thinkers in relief, against a background or context which itself received little attention, creates a misleading picture of these thinkers in relation to their contemporaries. Part of this positive project of re-embedding the canonical thinkers must involve new attention to the women who were active participants in the larger societal conversation about the meaning(s) of war and politics in early modern England. While Hobbes and his contemporaries may have had their own reasons for disregarding a political writer such as Margaret Cavendish (and indeed some very specific reasons for giving her at least respectful attention as the wife of William Cavendish, one of Hobbes’s patrons), contempo- rary historians of political thought and political theorists construct what I suggest is a phallocentric picture of early modern political discourse in failing to acknowledge the perspectives of women writers and activists in their work. Phallocentrism, as Elizabeth Grosz defines it, is a mode of representation in which the experiences and perspectives of the two sexes are collapsed into “a single model, called ‘human’ or ‘man, ’ ’’ when actually the experience or perspective in question is “congruent only with the masculine.” As a “universalization of particular features of masculinity, as if these were genuinely representative of both sexes,” phallocentrism, Grosz explains, “leaves women no conceptual space for developing autonomous interests and points of view other than or different from men’s.”5 Thus, when political theorists, historians of political thought, and, we might add at this point, military historians take the conversation between men about arms, military strategy, military leadership, and the causes of the Civil War to represent the whole of the human experience of the Civil War, eclipsing the women who, as activists, writers, wives, and family members contrib- uted to and shaped the discourse in important ways, they employ a phallocentric framework. Since historically war has been the business of men, the phallocentrism of military history and war writing has been at once invisible and “normal.” Alternatively, to disrupt phallocentrism requires that we foreground the gendered politics of knowledge construction and 4 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Joanne H. Wright

ask questions about whose perspectives are counted as authoritative and whose downplayed, downgraded, or undermined in a variety of unac- knowledged ways. As a means to investigate how early modern women’s perspectives on war are treated and evaluated, I have surveyed a selection of early and con- temporary military histories of the Civil War for references to Margaret Cavendish’s works.6 While many of Cavendish’s published works have been identified as having explicitly political themes, they have yet to be fully incorporated into the larger conversation of early modern political thought.7 However, military historians have historically made and continue to make use of her military biography of her husband, The Life of . . . William Cavendishe (1667), in their attempts to reconstruct the details of the famous battle of Marston Moor in which William suffered his historic defeat. For example, in his 1992 study of the experience of the Civil War, Charles Carleton draws upon Cavendish’s descriptions of grieving for her brother, Sir Charles Lucas, who was killed by Parliamentary forces: “Depression haunted Margaret for years. ‘Black despair like melancholy night, muffles my thoughts, and makes my soul blind,’ she wrote in 1648.”8 In Marston Moor 1644: The Campaign and the Battle (1970), Peter Young refers to Cavendish several times, stating at one point, “the Duchess of Newcastle to some extent confirms this story: ‘my Lord asked his Highness what service he would be pleased to command him . . . ’ ”9 Thus, while Cavendish remains all but invisible in the history of political thought, she does register in military history. Still, a small cross section of the field reveals ambivalence toward Cavendish as a legitimate source in military history. Her writing, it seems, is useful where it can supply the necessary corroboration of events, or as a record of the emotional turmoil of war, but its value as a credible account of what happened is called into question. She is judged useful for supplying raw information, but not genuine or objective knowledge.10 Consider the remarks of C. H. Firth in his highly regarded and formative 1898 interpretation, Marston Moor:

The account of the battle given in the Life of the Duke of Newcastle by the Duchess is extremely general, and confined mainly to an account Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies 5

of Newcastle’s personal adventures and a complaint of Rupert’s rash- ness in giving battle against Newcastle’s advice.11

Or C. V. Wedgewood’s subsequent dismissal in The King’s War 1641– 1647, which begins with her assertion that Clarendon’s account of the battle is

wholly misleading, and so is the account given by the Duchess of Newcastle many years later in her Life of her husband, although this besotted lady’s rendering of her husband’s smug exculpations are sometimes cited as an authority.12

Undoubtedly influenced by these earlier assessments, Young accuses Cavendish of telescoping events, describing her account of her husband’s actions as “confused enough,” and concludes that “The Duchess gives a very general account of the battle, which is chiefly of interest for her sometimes rather improbable account of her husband’s adventures.”13 In the chapter in which he offers this summation, Cavendish’s is the only account offered by a woman, and it is the only one prefaced by skepticism of its accuracy. In a later book, Young reiterates his skepticism of her objectivity (“The Duchess’s work exhibits considerable bias”14) while another historian deems her account “somewhat tendentious.”15 Surprisingly, although many of the military histories that I surveyed use her The Life of . . . William Cavendishe, they often do not refer to Cavendish by name in the text as the source (sometimes referring only to Firth, who edited the 1916 republica- tion16), and in several instances her work is not properly cited.17 To the extent that we can identify a pattern in the way that historians have uti- lized her biography, it is that they freely draw upon while simultaneously discrediting its validity. Malcolm Wanklyn’s Decisive Battles of the English Civil Wars: Myth and Reality (2006) takes a markedly different approach. A more recent and revisionist work in military history, Decisive Battles considers the historian’s problem of weighing evidence, explicitly troubling the “imperfections in the evidence that has survived to the present day . . . and the ways in which historians have sometimes used and misused it.”18 Just as great texts are written for immediate political ends, the purpose of battle narratives, diaries and 6 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Joanne H. Wright

memoirs, Wanklyn reminds us, “was not to provide future historians with a dispassionate record of what happened in the past, but to address the needs of the ‘then present.’”19 Similarly, Diane Purkiss cautions that memoirs and records of battle are written mostly in retrospect and share a desire to “call up and reanimate scenes” firmly embedded in the past.20 Wanklyn quotes Cavendish herself, who expressed skepticism of many “who have written of the late Civil War with but sprinklings of truth like as heat drops on a dry, barren ground knowing no more of the transactions of those times than what they learned in the Gazettes, which for the most part out of policy to amuse and deceive the people contain nothing but falsehoods.”21 Is Cavendish’s account more suspect because it records, not her own but her husband’s experience, or because it appears to be biased by her relationship to him? In Wanklyn’s view, these are reasons to regard it as a credible source. He writes revealingly,

I place far more trust in Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’s account, even though she was not herself there and did not compose it until almost twenty years after the battle. It has been rubbished, but its strength lies in the fact that it is to all intents and purposes the marquis’s memoirs. Margaret was a dutiful wife, and would not have gone into print without her husband’s total and absolute approval of what she had written.22

And he adds, “her narrative dovetails nicely with evidence from Parliamentary and other Royalist accounts without owing anything to them as sources, and it contains no obvious errors.”23 Thus what gives Cavendish credibility in his view is that she has written exactly what William wanted, and if he approved it and paid for its publication, it must be trustworthy. While Wanklyn’s analysis of the difficulties in reading historical documents and texts is important, especially his critique of earlier formative accounts of battle by military historians who willfully misread and misconstrued evidence, he values Cavendish not as a source of authoritative knowledge herself but as an efficient and dutiful conduit of another’s knowledge. The degree to which Cavendish was writing what she knew and recording her own analyses of events as compared to her desire to mir- Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies 7

ror her husband’s viewpoints is an issue that bears further discussion. Although Hilda Smith has demonstrated the differences in William and Margaret’s political views, and Mihoko Suzuki has posited Cavendish as an ambiguous royalist, arguments persist that Cavendish’s primary authorial intention was to communicate her husband’s perspective on his wartime losses in the Restoration era.24 In Hero Chalmers’s view, “The idea that she is articulating her husband’s grievances is, of course, most evident in her biography of him.”25 Chalmers emphasizes Cavendish’s desire to “write for [Newcastle], fulfilling a wifely duty to be his representative in public,” voicing his concerns when he was unable to do so. Chalmers calls into question the attempt to identify feminist leanings in Cavendish’s works, or to glean any “specific political message” in her writing, and is critical of interpretations that fail to appreciate the strength and complexity of Cavendish’s political commitment to royalism.26 Insofar as Chalmers and Wanklyn draw our attention in different ways to one of the multitude of complicated motivations underlying Cavendish’s writing, they offer an important perspective. Nevertheless, in so doing, they each, along with the military historians who express their explicit skepticism, deny Cavendish the epistemological agency that is necessary to position her as an important contributor to political discourse in the Civil War and Restoration periods. While the salvage operation that was William’s public reputation undoubtedly occupied Margaret’s attention, it seems to me that we are not doing justice to the other recurring political themes in her work if we position her first and foremost as a dutiful wife. We need not claim Cavendish’s The Life of . . . William Cavendishe as the whole truth, or disavow its biases and political motivations, but if we are to address the phallocentrism of military history we ought to query the skepticism of Cavendish as a source of knowledge about the Civil War, and to locate this skepticism within a larger understanding of the challenges in “women’s epistemic lives.”27 Indeed, if we place women who were writing about war at the center of our inquiry, we can more readily make sense of the challenges women face in making knowledge claims, especially in an area of experience as highly gendered as war. 8 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Joanne H. Wright

Brilliana Harley: knowledge under siege

[These documents/letters] provide a clear and connected account of [Brilliana Harley’s] gallant defence of Brampton Castle from its investment, 26 July, 1643, to its relief by Essex, her death early in the following September . . . the subsequent reduction of Brampton Castle. These transactions were certainly of no great importance, the forces engaged in both sides inconsiderable, and the Losses . . . insig- nificant—28

When Cavendish writes imaginatively in Bell in Campo and A New World, Called a Blazing World of female war heroines, of women who wanted to command troops and exercise military authority in their own right, she could have been sketching the story of Brilliana Harley. As the wife of Parliamentarian Sir Robert Harley, Brilliana Harley managed the affairs of her family estate, Brampton Bryan Castle, while her husband was sit- ting in Parliament prior to and during the Civil War. She continued its management while it was under threat by Royalist forces and ultimately during its seven-week siege in the summer of 1643. Following the siege, she commanded her own men to plunder opposing forces near Brampton.29 During these events, Brilliana Harley kept up a vigorous correspondence with her husband and her son, as she also exchanged letters with officials of the Royalist side and King Charles I himself. The inclusion of a selection of Brilliana Harley’s correspondence in the recently published four volume series, Women’s Political Writings, 1610–1725, edited by Hilda Smith, Mihoko Suzuki, and Susan Wiseman, signals an emerging recognition of her political import, as well as an understanding of the need to consider the epistolary form as a genre of political writing.30 The facts of Harley’s gender and social status as a gentlewoman combined with her “gallant” and courageous defense of Brampton Bryan have made her an intriguing subject for historical commentary. Antonia Fraser describes her as “the seventeenth-century masculine ideal of a wartime heroine,” while at her husband’s funeral she was characterized as “That noble Lady and Phoenix of Women.”31 Civil War accounts label Harley as “a woman of great spirit,” a “noble lady who commanded in chief,” who exercised “a masculine bravery,” and who, upon being asked to relinquish Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies 9

her hold of the castle, “protested, that she would rather choose an honour- able death. . . .”32 The militarized language of her sacrifice for the greater cause, as well as her courage and heroism, place her inside the discourse of war while also ensuring her status within it as exceptional because of her gender. Moreover, effusive praise aside, the events at Brampton Bryan, however exciting, are dismissed as being “of no great importance” to the outcome of the war (as quoted earlier). So Harley herself is a source of fascination, but the siege of Brampton Bryan is but one of many small battles and incidents that make up the Civil War. Shifting the analysis to consider, not just the “decisive battles,” or what tipped the balance in the war, I consider Harley’s story in her written correspondence as significant for its revelation, not just of what (some privileged) women were doing during the Civil War—their actions and their quotidian, “on the ground” experience of war—but of what they were thinking about the war, how they wrote and constructed knowledge about it.33 It is evident from Harley’s correspondence that the Civil War pro- vided her an occasion, as it did women pamphleteers and petitioners, to test a language of citizenship, ownership, property, and even rights that contradicted the gendered ideological norms in this period. In a heated exchange between Harley and Sir William Vavasour, who, it is reported, “hath drawn his forces before your castle, with resolution to reduce it,”34 Vavasour warns her, “if you remain still willful, what you may suffer is brought upon you by yourself, I having by this timely notice discharged those respects due to your sex and honour.”35 Harley retorts,

I know nothing I can be reduced to but poverty . . . I wrote the gentle- men word I would endeavour to keep what was mine as long as I could and I know that does not make me an ill subject, nor give any- one warrant to take it from me.36

Harley’s refusal to relinquish her castle is offered in a tone of independence and autonomy, bordering on bravado. Strategically positioning herself as a dutiful subject, she resists any association of her activities with resistance to the King, insisting instead that her intention is merely to defend herself and her property. Harley also lays claim to a discourse of citizenship to challenge Royalist demands: 10 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Joanne H. Wright

Our gracious kinge, having many times promised that he will main- taine the lawes and libertyes of the kingdome, by which I have as good right to what is mine as any one, maintaines me these, and I know not upon what ground the refusal of giveinge you what is mine—by the lawes of the land—will prove me or any that is with mee, traytors.37

When offered safe passage away from her home in exchange for her arms and castle, she replies strategically:

Sir, for me to yield that you should place a garrison in my house, I cannot find out any reason for it, and under what notion you would do it, I know not; but this I conceive, I should become a prisoner in my own house, which I cannot yield to . . . my dear husband hath entrusted me with his house and children, and therefore I cannot dispose of his house but according to his pleasure, and I do not know it is his pleasure that I should entertain soldiers in his house; and surely, Sir, I never will voluntarily betray the trust my husband reposeth in me.38

Thus Harley vacillates between an assertion of her right to protect her property—with her powerful refusal to become a prisoner in her own house— and the claim that it is her duty to protect her husband’s home and children in his absence. She uses the unique situation of the war to assert her own autonomy and rights, yet, where strategically necessary, draws upon familiar discourses of marital hierarchy and appropriate wifely deference in the interests of keeping the soldiers at bay.39 Harley’s correspondence reveals both her commitment to the Parliamentary cause and her own sense of herself as having an indepen- dent and autonomous stake in the conflict between Parliament and the King. Her interpreters point to the interconnections between her religious commitment to Puritanism, her political agency, her maternal devotion (in her letters to Ned Harley) and her wifely obedience. From Jacqueline Eales, we get a picture of a woman increasingly isolated in a sea of Royalist support, who is “determined to face the breakdown of familiar social ties, and the threat of royalist violence, with her characteristic deference to the judgment of her husband allied with her faith in God.”40 Eales argues that, far from disrupting patriarchy, Harley, as an elite woman fulfilling her duty Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies 11

to protect family and property in the absence of her husband, upholds it.41 Still, as Susan Wiseman posits, “we can see very clearly in the nature of this [wifely] obedience the powerful ties which connected women to politics.”42 Wiseman sees Harley as entering the political realm through the very spaces (the household) and discourses (marital obedience) that typically act as barriers to women’s involvement in politics.43 Thus, in her correspondence with Royalist officials, even the familiar language of obedience is more complicated than it might appear. Indeed, in Harley’s correspondence with her husband, there is a competing discourse at work that might be obscured by an overemphasis on her wifely obedience. In Harley’s letters to Sir Robert, we see a complicated epistemic negotiation of her gender with her political authority and her knowledge of the war. In frequent letters, Harley communicated apparently helpful and reliable information about the state of affairs in Hereford. Yet, she also attempts to assert her own knowledge about the imminence of war, of a potential attack on Brampton Bryan, and her sense of increasing isolation.44 In letter after letter, over a period of years, she states her concerns that she is in danger, that she is much disliked amongst the local residents, and that they intend to do her harm:

. . . the Cuntry grows very insolent and if there should be any rising I think I am in a unsafe place . . . I desire you would be pleased to think of it for in my opinion it were much better for me to be of London, there is no body in the Cuntry that [Loves] you or me, but I hope the Lord will be mercyful to us. I pray you think of it and be pleased to let me know your resolution and what your mind is I shall be contented with.45

A month later she claims to “count meself amongt my enemies,” asking Sir Robert to consider whether she might “boord with some friend for some time.” 46 In many of these letters, after stating the dangers she perceives, she asks for Sir Robert’s advice in the event of an attack, and assures him that her concern stems, not from fear but out of concern for the well-being of Brampton Bryan and their children. Because Sir Robert’s letters to his wife did not survive, we have no basis from which to assess his response to her 12 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Joanne H. Wright

attestations of the danger she was facing or her requests to remove to a safer location. Does he take her fears seriously, or does he disregard her assertions and her questions altogether? We can only speculate. Nevertheless, her letters continue to press the issue over a period of months, even years, in a respectful but forceful manner. For example, in her letter of November 20, 1641, after expressing her view that Brampton Bryan would not be able to withstand a siege for long, she states: “I doo not say this out of feare but I thinke I judg a Right.”47 It is evident that whatever reassurance he offers does not fundamentally alter her thinking about her own situation. In December, 1641, Harley refers to his reassurance:

I doo not thinke it is good to be so secure, I thanke you that you give me warninge not to be afraid, I hope I am not, I desire to place my security in the safe protection of my God. . . .48

Nor is this the end of the matter. In the following June, in a letter in which she relays having overheard a threat in her garden that all the Puritans at Brampton should be hanged, she writes, “Since you thinke I need not be afraid when I am, I will be of your minde and as willingly stay where I am as remove to any other place only I should be very glad to see you.” 49 Here she acknowledges that they see the seriousness of the threat differently, but commits to being “of his mind,” to deferring to his view- point. Still, if we observe the tone of her letters leading up to the siege, we would be hard pressed to ignore her manifest anxiety and perhaps even her frustration at having to state over and over again the threat she perceives. I suggest that the anxiety and frustration we witness in Harley’s letters is at least partially epistemic. Brilliana Harley is a woman struggling to assert and gain recognition for her own knowledge claims about the war. She understands very well her own isolation in Hereford, flanked by Royalist sympathizers on all sides, and she knows that, with few resources left and no rents coming in to pay her staff, she is on the verge of becoming even more vulnerable.50 “[T]hey mean to come against [me],” she writes, but to no avail.51 The apparent absence of validation for Harley’s knowledge claims about her own circumstance is consistent with a larger picture of the difficulties women face when attempting to assert their knowledge. Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies 13

Women’s knowledge, whether of themselves, of their experience, or in this case, of war, has not often been understood as legitimate and credited as knowledge. As feminist epistemologist Lorraine Code contends, truth claims require acknowledgement and validation in order to become accred- ited knowledge. Women who claim to know something, but who cannot gain the necessary validation for that knowledge, can be “both metaphori- cally and literally, driven crazy.”52 Code uses an analogy of a woman, Sara, who observes a “cat on the mat” to illustrate the process by which women’s knowledge claims are undermined. In this analogy, Sara’s claim that the cat is on the mat is denied by all those around her. Thus it is that making a simple assertion about something that is right before her eyes becomes an occasion for Sara to begin to distrust her own observational capaci- ties—women are “gaslighted,” as Adrienne Rich puts it, by “the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.”53 The perpetual denial of acknowledgement for women’s knowledge claims ultimately serves to foster their increased dependency, as women lose faith in their “cognitive competence” and come to depend on the judgment of others.54 Feminist epistemology has much to offer our analysis of Harley and other women thinkers and writers of the early modern period. The question is not just what Harley knew, but how she claimed to know it, and to what extent her claims were recognized as valid ones. The point of considering Harley’s correspondence through this lens of epistemic struggle is not to assert that women qua women know differently, but to point to the challenges women face in being recognized as having valid knowledge of war, to recognize multiple knowledge(s) of war, and to embed women’s knowledge(s) of war within the larger narrative of the Civil War itself. In considering each of these issues, we are shifting our focus from thinking about women as people to whom war happens to thinking about women as “developing a political analysis” of war.55 In this framework, women move from the position of passive witnesses of war to political agents who construct their own knowledge of it, knowledge that might not resonate with dominant military perspectives, but has the capacity to illuminate a whole range of human experience of war typically rendered invisible in military history. 14 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Joanne H. Wright

Margaret Cavendish: the multiplicity of experience

The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.56 —Thomas King

In shifting our focus from Harley to consider Cavendish’s war writing, several differences pertain. Cavendish’s works were published in the Restoration, and thus have an entirely different sensibility and tone than the private letter written during the war. Additionally, partly enabled by their publicity, Cavendish’s writing on war moves from the immediacy of her own personal experience, and from the specific, to the general,57 theorizing the dangers of civil war, the experience of war for women, and offering critiques of Civil War notions of military honor and conceptions of masculinity.58 At the same time, Cavendish’s war writings retain a connection to the specific, to the local and private experience of war, and thus have the capacity to help us understand a whole spectrum of wartime experience beyond what straightforward battle accounts can provide. Cavendish’s writing makes available knowledge that is in touch with the “on the ground” experiences of the Civil War in all of their diversity and that is thus more epistemologically responsive and responsible than traditional military knowledge. As Cavendish scholars know, Cavendish had a great deal more to say about war than what appears in her military biography.59 Indeed, war and the problems of civil war in particular constitute a central theme in Cavendish’s writing. Orations of Divers Sorts represents her thought on war in perhaps its most abstracted and theoretical form, presenting orations on a variety of war-related (as well as other) subjects, from a king’s communi- cation with his rebellious subjects to a general’s speech to soldiers after a defeat in battle. In these short discourses, Cavendish tackles traditionally masculine territory in at least two important senses: she enters the terrain of abstract and theoretical discourse, and she offers her own analyses of the thoroughly masculine subject of war. Like Harley, then, Cavendish proves herself capable of constructing knowledge about war; her perspectives are not simply reflections of her husband’s views, nor is Cavendish a mere Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies 15

passive observer of the war. Rather, in writing and publishing Orations, she is actively participating in the Restoration conversation about the causes and effects of the Civil War, generating her own analyses to be considered alongside that of her contemporaries. One of the challenges for interpreters of Orations lies, as Mihoko Suzuki states, in the “heteroglossia of diverse positions” taken up in these multiple short discourses.60 Susan James points out that Cavendish tin- kered with the usual practice in presenting several, rather than just two, sides of an issue, signifying her understanding that “there are sometimes more than two sides to a question.”61 While much has been made of Cavendish’s assertion in the introduction to Sociable Letters that her orations “speak Pro and Con, and Determine nothing” (p. 42), in this reading I suggest that despite certain challenges, it is possible to ascertain specific themes and problems at work in the text, to arrive at an understanding of what Cavendish thought most troubling about civil war, as well as her views about the effects of war on soldiers and the communities they left behind.62 If we read across the Orations for her treatment of war in general, it becomes evident that Cavendish raises with persistence, and with a critical tone and language, a recurring set of issues to which she was particularly attuned; these issues include how soldiers and generals will be remembered after their deaths, whether the promise of everlasting fame and glory is sincere, and the fate of bodies in war. As I have argued else- where, the tone in which Cavendish treats these subjects, her use of visceral and bodily metaphors, and the fact of her near obsession with death in war can be interpreted as registering her skepticism concerning romantic ideals of masculine sacrifice. Other areas of concern to Cavendish include just conduct of soldiers in war-time63 (stemming from her own family’s losses and abuses by soldiers during the war), the importance of temperance and prudence in assessing the need to go to war in the first place (as compared to allowing pride and other vanities to be the motivators of men), and the human flaw that people seem to need to experience war firsthand to understand its brutality. Like many political theorists, Cavendish highlights civil war as particularly taxing to any nation. In her oration 154, “An Oration against Civil War,” Cavendish makes clear her view that “there is nothing so miserable, 16 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Joanne H. Wright hateful, cruel and irreligious as civil war” (269). Unlike a foreign war that can unite a nation against a foreign enemy, a civil war divides the nation against itself, leaving nothing but destruction and death and a “country so weak as it becomes a prey to foreign enemies, and the remainders of the natives become slaves; so that civil war begins with liberty but ends in slavery” (269). Her approach here is theoretical, and yet it is theory with a difference. Her repeated references to bodies consumed, urns dug up and bones cast about, her emphasis on the physicality of war’s destruction, forces the reader to confront the “on the ground” experience of war in a manner not typical of Civil War political thought. The grim character of her orations on war is capped off with oration 166, “An Oration to a Discontented People,” in which she concludes that human beings are unlikely ever to be satisfied even with the best regime:

a fellow creature will never be satisfied with any power, nor the rest of men will never be satisfied with any government, so as we shall never live in a settled peace in this world, nor never dwell peaceably but in the grave, nor never be happily governed but by that grim and great monarch, Death. (281)

In Orations, Cavendish departs from the conventions of objective and disinterested inquiry to convey the gravity of her topic. When considering a subject with as much life-and-death importance as the nature and meaning of war, Cavendish does a service to the issue at hand by considering as many views as possible, by offering a multi-sided analysis. Rather than posing a barrier to interpretation, then, the multi-sidedness of her orations facilitates deeper understanding of the complexity of war by giving voice to a whole range of experiences and responses to it. Moreover, as Suzuki posits, offering multiple perspectives “allowed Cavendish to publish oppositional views sympathetic to the plight of women less fortunate than herself,”64 or, in this case, such heteroglossia may have opened a space in which she could consider more critical perspectives on war that would have fallen outside the bounds of acceptable discourse. If we focus on the diversity of views represented in Orations as a source of difficulty while downplaying the persistent themes within, we may be doing an injustice to the political ideas Cavendish sought to articulate; we may undermine her own sense of purpose as an epistemic agent. Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies 17

If, in her The Life of . . . William Cavendishe and Orations, Cavendish demonstrates her ability to enter the masculine terrain of traditional military subjects such as leadership and battle strategy, many of her other works present an entirely different dimension of wartime experience. In both Sociable Letters and Bell in Campo, Cavendish presents multiple stories and narratives that chronicle human experience of war, that treat seriously other kinds of wartime experiences, including those like Harley’s. Here the assertion, quoted earlier, regarding the insignificance of Harley’s defense of Brampton Bryan stands out once again. Not only does this assertion prioritize a “decisive battles” approach to military history, but it also fails to appreciate what can be learned from the story of the siege of Brampton Bryan. In Brilliana Harley’s letters, as in Cavendish’s many stories of war, we have an alternative site of knowledge production, the creation of a kind of knowledge that is not available to us in military histories that focus on great battles. For example, early in the play Bell in Campo, Cavendish presents competing viewpoints of women who have learned of their husband’s imminent departure for battle. In these scenes, which constitute a short narrative within the larger drama, one woman’s misery is another woman’s delight. Starting with the exchange between Lady Victoria and the Lord General in Act I, scene ii, Cavendish depicts five conversations in which husband and wife discuss his departure, with each conversation revealing a distinct attitude about war, marriage, and female autonomy. While Lady Victoria wishes to show her marital devotion by going to war alongside Lord General, Madam Whiffell describes herself as too tender to endure the journey. Madam Ruffell flatly refuses to suffer the inconvenience and humiliation of following her husband, asking Captain Ruffell if he would have her march along “with a knapsack behind me as your trull?”65 When Ruffell threatens to take up with the laundry-maid at the front, she responds flippantly, “Prithee husband take thy kitchen maid along too . . . and while you ride with your laundry- maid in your wagon, I will ride with my gentleman-usher in my coach” (42). In the opposite vein, Madam Jantil and Madam Passionate are both inconsolable at the thought of their husbands’ injury or death, with Madam Passionate bidding her husband, “Farewell, I fear I shall never see you again, for your absence will soon kill me” (45). 18 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Joanne H. Wright

Taken on their own, these lively exchanges embedded in the drama reveal the diversity of women’s responses to war, attitudes to marriage, and ideas about women’s independence. Cavendish has an intuitive ability to survey a range of women’s experiences, validating rather than trivializing them. Epistemologically, the exchanges on military service resemble Cavendish’s portrayal of the gossiping women who analyze the institution of marriage in the play-within-the-play in Convent of Pleasure.66 What emerges from these intimate and informal exchanges in Bell in Campo is not one true perspective, but a more disorderly and multifaceted picture that reflects women’s diverse but equally valid opinions on their husbands’ departures. In keeping the picture disorderly, Cavendish is able to retain a connection with and a responsiveness to human experience of war, while countering prevailing ideas about women’s passivity. In each of these scenarios, the option of women’s passivity is explicitly denied, as Lady Victoria goes on to lead a successful women’s army to the front, Madam Ruffell threatens to take a new lover, and Madam Jantil, following news of the death of her husband, constructs a monument to her husband’s valor and to her own grief. Most importantly, as I have argued, Cavendish offers this account of women’s responses to war as necessary to the larger understanding of the meaning and dangers of war.67 Cavendish also treats the subject of civil war in several of her Sociable Letters, offering short and (often) bleak portrayals of its effects in epistolary form. Letters 119, 120, and 185 are thematically linked by considerations of the chaos and “Inhuman Acts” of civil wars, causing even the “Urns of the Dead [to be dug] up, their Dust Dispersed, and their Bones Thrown about” (Letter 119). Civil war also divides friends and family against each other, as she writes in Letter 120:

A Civil War doth not only Abolish Laws, Dissolve Government, and Destroy the Plenty of a Kingdom, but it doth Unknit the Knot of Friendship, and Dissolve Natural Affections, for in Civil War, Brothers against Brothers, Fathers against Sons, and Sons against Fathers, become Enemies, and Spill each other’s Blood, Triumphing on their Graves; for when a Kingdom is Inflamed with Civil War, the Minds of all the People are in a Fever of Fury, or a Furious Fever of Cruelty, which, by nothing but Letting Blood by the Surgeon of War, can be Cured. . . . Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies 19

Resonating with her Orations, these short narratives allow the reader insight into how the war looked from the perspective of townspeople and members of families and communities. The letters reveal the destructive- ness that the Civil War occasioned within counties and communities, where formerly relations of trust and friendship had prevailed. Of course, Harley had witnessed the deterioration in community relations firsthand, hence her mounting fear of her own Royalist-sympathizing neighbors. Indeed, she is instructed by Sir William Croft that, despite his personal affection for her husband and herself, “he would doo in the publicke what he could against any,” which is to say, he would deal with her resistance to Royalist demands impartially, with threats and potentially violence. Again giving voice to her own anxiety (and that of women like Harley), Cavendish states in Letter 185 that once men leave for war, women “never enjoy a Minute’s Rest or Quiet, for there is not only a War in the Mind, as betwixt Hope and Doubt, but a Tyrant, which is Fear. . . .” (251). Cavendish’s narrative explorations in Sociable Letters deliver serious insights in the midst of sociable, gossipy conversation. Although informal in style, the Sociable Letters are not meant merely to entertain and amuse. I suggest that there is political value in the stories offered within, just as there is political meaning in the Harley correspondence. Storytelling becomes another site of knowledge production, generating knowledge that is interested and responsive to the everyday experiences of those living through war, making available aspects of that experience that are unlikely to surface in rational and objective accounts of war. Telling stories, and taking private experiences and putting them into the public is, as Catherine Cavanaugh and Randi Warne suggest, “a weighty business and not to be taken lightly.”68 Storytelling is not optional, then, but necessary to human beings: “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.”69 Disrupting phallocentric accounts and assumptions about knowledge of war requires that we pay attention to stories, and that we give them the weight they deserve. Cavendish’s narrative explorations of war in Bell in Campo, Orations, and Sociable Letters present a complicated, even disorderly and at times unwieldy, picture of wartime experience. Neither her theoretical analyses nor her stories are reducible to a “nugget of pure truth.”70 Yet, as I have 20 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Joanne H. Wright suggested, as interpreters, we need to credit Cavendish with the epistemic agency of a war writer intensely interested in understanding the war and offering her own distinct perspective on its meaning. We can also view Cavendish as engaging in an exercise of epistemic leveling, allowing for the seemingly mundane, the trivial, and the feminine to compete for space with the authoritative accounts of war. In forcing contact between abstract knowledge and knowledge derived “on the ground,” Cavendish’s way of knowing about war may be more epistemologically responsible because it surveys not just the big ideas and the political theory of the Civil War, but the everyday lives and sensibilities of people who were living through it.

Harley and Cavendish as war writers

In the creation of a category of women war writers of the English Civil War, there is no demand to assert an artificial uniformity, or a false sense of shared concerns. Nevertheless, when we take these writings seriously as offering an important and distinctive site for knowledge production, we effectively disrupt the prevailing yet invisible phallocentric understandings about what properly constitutes military history, analysis, and political theory of war. To take women’s war writing seriously is to discover that women’s perspectives on war may sound different, and may come from a place outside or beyond the bounds of what we normally consider the sites for knowledge production, spaces that are personal, private, or domestic. Moreover, in opening ourselves up to this category of writing, we have an opportunity to generate new and multiple understandings about the totality of wartime experience—in fact, new knowledge(s)—that can help us think in fresh ways about the meaning of war. From both Harley and Cavendish we glean insights about the meaning of war, not just for the soldiers who fight, but for those left behind, and we learn about the costs of civil war in terms of the breakdown of families and communities. Both Harley and Cavendish force us (and their public or private readers) to notice and to consider the palpable anxiety and fear of women who, as wives, mothers, and family members, must await potentially devastating news, and who, in attempting to protect loved ones, become political and military agents in their own right. And, finally, in assessing early modern Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies 21

women’s war writings alongside women’s actions during wartime, we would be remiss if we failed to mention an uncomfortable fact: that even for women deeply opposed to war, or at least opposed to its brutalities as both Harley and Cavendish were, war also presents an opportunity to test novel discourses of citizenship and political agency, to take on new roles, and to challenge—sometimes inadvertently—long-reigning forms of patriarchal power in creative and unprecedented ways.

Notes

1. Claire Buck, “British Women’s Writing of the Great War,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War, ed. Vincent Sherry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 2. Lois G. Schwoerer, “Women’s public political voice in England: 1640–1740,” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 61. See also Patricia Crawford, “The Challenges to Patriarchalism: How Did the Revolution Affect Women?” in Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s, ed. John Morrill (London: Collins and Brown, 1992). 3. Mihoko Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588–1688 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 182. 4. Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation,” European Journal of Philosophy 13, no. 2 (2005): 155. 5. Elizabeth Grosz, “Philosophy,” in Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct, ed. Sneja Gunew (New York: Routledge, 1990), 150. On the gendered assumptions of intellectual history, see Hilda L. Smith, “Women Intellectuals and Intellectual History: their paradigmatic separation,” Women’s History Review 16, no. 3 (July 2007): 353–68. 6. I wish to thank my research assistant, Kerri Krawec, for her help in compil- ing this survey. 7. The publication of Margaret Cavendish, Political Writings, ed. Susan James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), is an important step in this direction. 8. Charles Carleton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the English Civil Wars, 1638–1651 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 220. 9. Peter Young, Marston Moor 1644: The Campaign and the Battle (Kineton, Warwick: The Roundwood Press, 1970), 117. 10. I am borrowing the distinction between information, which is “‘raw,’ specific and practical,” and knowledge, which is information that has been “‘cooked,’ processed or systematized by thought,” from Peter Burke’s A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 11. 11. C. H. Firth, “Marston Moor,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, New Series, 12 (1898): 63. 22 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Joanne H. Wright

12. C. V. Wedgwood, The King’s War 1641–1647 (London: Collins, 1958), 662. 13. Young, Marston Moor 1644, 125, 127 and 218. 14. Peter Young, The English Civil War: A Military History of the Three Civil Wars, 1642–1651 (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), 218–22. 15. John Barratt, The Battle of Marston Moor 1644 (Gloucestershire, UK: The History Press, 2008), 33. 16. Margaret Cavendish, The Life of the (1st) Duke of Newcastle and Other Writings by Margaret Duchess, ed. C. H. Firth (London & Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1916). 17. For example, see Stuart Reid, All the King’s Armies: A Military History of the English Civil War 1642–1651 (Kent, UK: Spellmount, 1998); John Tucker and Lewis S. Winstock, eds., The Civil War: A Military Handbook (London: Arms & Armour Press, 1972); and Young, Marston Moor 1644. 18. Malcolm Wanklyn, Decisive Battles of the English Civil War: Myth and Reality (South Yorkshire, UK: Pen and Sword Military, 2006), 3. 19. Ibid., 8. 20. Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics During the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 34. 21. Quoted in Wanklyn, Decisive Battles, 8. 22. Wanklyn, Decisive Battles, 112–13. 23. Ibid. 24. Hilda L. Smith, “‘A General War Amongst the Men but None Amongst the Women’: Political Differences Between Margaret and William Cavendish,” in Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain: Essays Presented to Lois Green Schwoerer, ed. Howard Nenner (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997); and Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, 182. 25. Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers 1650–1689 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2004), 25. 26. Ibid., 7–9. 27. Lorraine Code, What Can She Know: Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 217. 28. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Bath, vol. 1 (London: H.M.S.O., 1904), vi. 29. Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 159. 30. Hilda L. Smith, Mihoko Suzuki, and Susan Wiseman, eds., Women’s Political Writings, 1610–1725, vol. 1 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007). 31. Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel (New York: Vintage, 1984), 175 and 181 respectively. 32. Captain Priamus Davies, “An Account of the sieges of Brampton Castle and the massacre at Hopton Castle. . . .” in Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Bath, vol. 1, 24–27. Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies 23

33. On the question of using women’s letters as a source for mining women’s political views, see Smith, Suzuki and Wiseman, “General Introduction,” in Women’s Political Writings, xxii. See also James Daybell, ed., Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700 (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 34. Henry Lingen, Sir W. Pye, and William Smallman to (Brilliana) Lady Harley, July 26, 1643, reprinted in Calandar of the Manuscipts of the Marquis of Bath, 1: 8. 35. Sir William Vavasour to Brilliana (Lady) Harley, July 28, [1643], reprinted in Calandar of the Manuscipts of the Marquis of Bath, 9. 36. Brilliana, Lady Harley to Sir William Vavasour, July 28, 1643, reprinted in Calendar of the Manuscipts of the Marquis of Bath, 9. 37. Brilliana, Lady Harley to [Fitzwilliam Coningsby], March 4, 1642 [–3], reprinted in Historical Manuscripts Commission, The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland preserved at Welbeck Abbey, vol. 3 (London: H.M.S.O., 1894), 105. 38. Brilliana, Lady Harley to Sir W. Vavasour, July 31, 1643, reprinted in Calandar of the Manuscipts of the Marquis of Bath, 12. 39. Diane Purkiss also detects a level of strategic thinking at work in Harley’s assertions of helplessness and statements of loyalty to the crown in The English Civil War: A People’s History (London: Harper Collins, 2006), 221. 40. Eales, Puritans and Roundheads, 151. 41. Jacqueline Eales, “Patriarchy, Puritanism and Politics: the Letters of Lady Brilliana Harley (1598–1643),” Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700, ed. Daybell, 155–56. 42. Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Toronto: Oxford, 2006), 78–79. 43. Ibid. 44. See Fraser, The Weaker Vessel, 176–77; and Eales, Puritans and Roundheads, 150–1. 45. Lady Brilliana Harley to Sir Robert Harley, June 4, 1642, British Library, Add. MSS 70003, fol. 251. 46. Lady Brilliana Harley to Sir Robert Harley, July 8, 1642, British Library, Add. MSS 70004, fols. 6 and 7. 47. Lady Brilliana Harley to Sir Robert Harley, November 20, 1641, British Library, Add. MSS 70003, fol. 172. 48. Lady Brilliana Harley to Sir Robert Harley, December 11, 1641, British Library, Add. MSS 70003, fol. 179. 49. Lady Brilliana Harley to Sir Robert Harley, June 1642, British Library, Add. MSS 70110, fol. 74. 50. See Lady Brilliana Harley to Sir Robert Harley, February 23, 1642, British Library, Add. MSS 70004, fol. 98. 51. Lady Brilliana Harley to Sir Robert Harley, September 4, 1642, British Library, Add. MSS 70004, fol. 52. 24 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Joanne H. Wright

52. Code, What Can She Know, 217. 53. Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence, Selected Prose 1966–1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), 190. 54. Code, What Can She Know, 218. 55. Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue, 61. 56. Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Toronto: Anansi, 2003), 32. 57. Nevertheless, in her commonplace book, Brilliana Harley presents a few general statements about war: for example, the definition of truce. See Smith, Suzuki, and Wiseman, eds., Women’s Political Writings, 1610–1725, vol. 1, 117. 58. I develop this argument further in “Questioning gender, war and ‘the old lie’”: the military expertise of Margaret Cavendish,” in The History of British Women’s Writing: 1610–1690, ed. Mihoko Suzuki (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). 59. For discussion of Cavendish on female heroism, see Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Karen L. Raber, “Warrior Women in the Plays of Cavendish and Killigrew,” Studies in English Literature 40, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 413–33. On her response to the crisis of political obligation during the Civil War, see Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), ch. 7. Patricia Demers, Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), offers a general introduction to Cavendish’s writing, situating it within the larger body of early modern women’s writings. On this, see also Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), ch. 6; and Sara Heller Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women: three studies (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1987), ch. 1. 60. Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, 188. 61. Susan James, “Introduction” to Cavendish, Political Writings, xxii. 62. See Anna Batigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 73–79; Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 9; and James, “Introduction,” xxii. As Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne note in their Introduction to Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2007), women dissenters commonly “insisted on fore- grounding their own worthlessness” (17) even as they presented otherwise assertive and even militant political arguments. It is in this vain that I suggest we should interpret Cavendish’s many similar statements of authorial inadequacy as well as her claim that Orations does not reflect any of her own viewpoints. 63. It is useful here to note the parallels between Cavendish’s textual depictions of soldiers in war and Jacques Callot’s visual representations in Miseries of War. I am grateful to both the editorial board of the journal as well as Bret Rothstein for directing me to Callot’s work. See also Diane Wolfthal, “Jacques Callot’s Miseries of War,” The Art Bulletin 59, no. 2 (June, 1977): 222–33. 64. Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, 202. Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies 25

65. Bell in Campo, in Bell in Campo; The Sociable Companions, ed. Alexandra G. Bennett (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), 41. Further references in text. 66. I treat this in more depth in “Reading the Private in Margaret Cavendish: Conversations in Political Thought,” in British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 212–34. 67. See Wright, “Questioning gender, war and ‘the old lie.’” 68. Catherine A. Cavanaugh and Randi R. Warne, “Introduction” to Telling Tales: Essays in Western Women’s History, ed. Catherine A. Cavanaugh (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2000), 3. As Lorraine Code argues, “our ideas of what is possible for human beings come partly, at least, from stories. We learn something of what it is like to be in circumstances we have never experienced and perhaps never will experience partly, at least, from stories. . . ”; see Lorraine Code, “Stories People Tell,” New Mexico Law Review 16 (Fall 1986): 604. 69. King, The Truth About Stories, 32. 70. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4.