Surface and Interiority: Self-Creation in Margaret Cavendish's The Claspe.

Recent criticism has generally agreed that Margaret Cavendish was one of the first English woman writers to conceive of and create a female subjecthood: Cavendish is credited with having constructed herself out of whole cloth, so to speak.(1) Current critics often perceive her eccentricities as a sign of her originary self-fashioning, made possible partly by her privileged position as a wealthy aristocrat with an indulgent husband and partly by the improvised court society that offered not direct prescriptions but a flexible paradigm for self-shaping. Catherine Gallagher alludes…