This week's Book of the Week is Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton, a novel based on the completely extraordinary life of 17th century aristocrat, philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction-writer, and playwright Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

>> Read Stella's review. 

>> "A small miracle of imaginative sympathy."

>> "Prickly, shy, arrogant, imaginative, contradictory, curious, confused, melancholic, ambitious, restless."

>> A Description of the New World, Called the Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish (which inspired The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt).

>> The philosophy of Margaret Cavendish.

>> And now in PowerPoint.

>> A sampler of Margaret Cavendish's works. 

>> Danielle Dutton: "One of the most original and wonderfully weird prose stylists of our time".

>> Dutton is also a publisher at the very excellent The Dorothy Project.