Jane Cavendish - Later Years

Later Years

The Restoration brought some changes into Jane’s world, a major one being the return of her father to England with his second wife—Margaret Lucas Cavendish. Margaret was an unwelcome addition to the family, and Jane wrote several letters discussing the control Margaret was exercising over William’s property and income with other members of the family. Some scholars have read the character of "Lady Tranquility" in Jane and Elizabeth’s play The Concealed Fansyes as a satire of Margaret Lucas, but others consider this unlikely. While the fictional father's choice of an unsuitable fiancee may reflect some anxiety on his daughters' parts, there are few if any similarities to the real Margaret Lucas. Furthermore, the manuscript book which contains The Concealed Fansyes, another play and a variety of poems, was prepared as a presentation copy, a gift to William Cavendish from his daughters, intended for his pleasure and enjoyment. It seems likely that his daughters sought to emulate their playwright father, not offend him.

In 1664, Jane met with an untimely loss. Her sister Elizabeth died in childbed, which prompted Jane to write an elegy on Elizabeth. It is difficult to know how much poetry Jane wrote during these later years. The elegy for Elizabeth is the only trace of it that has yet been discovered, but Nathan Comfort Starr and others have suggested that Jane continued to write poetry throughout her life.

Regardless of whether or not she wrote poetry after leaving Welbeck in the 1650s, Jane did manage to leave her mark on the world in a highly public way: she used her own money to have Chelsea Church re-roofed in 1667. After her death in 1669 from a series of epileptic fits, Jane’s impact on Chelsea was chronicled in a funeral sermon by Adam Littleton and an elegy by Thomas Lawrence. Both of these texts make mention of how Jane used her financial resources to benefit her community; the texts also imply that Jane’s role as a literary author was not unknown to her friends and neighbors. First at Welbeck and later in the house she shared with her husband and in the community of Chelsea more broadly, Jane engaged in culture on her own terms.

There continues to be much that we do not know about how her works were circulated, how she developed her own political networks, and what her status was in her community, but by examining her manuscript writings within the sophisticated (and continually evolving) frameworks for approaching manuscript culture that scholars like Margaret J. M. Ezell, Harold Love, and Heidi Brayman Hackel have recently developed, we can begin to disentangle some of the complexities surrounding this amazingly resilient, creative women’s writings and her world.