Rees 2003

with Cavendish, "attempts to separate writer and work are doomed because of the author's dogged textual insistence and presence" (2)

"it is through a careful choice of genre that Cavendish succeeds in formulating controversial arguments. Repeatedly she lulls the reader into believing that he or she is reading a generically familiar text. When that genre's antecedents are examined, however, Cavendish's unique take on it emerges in all its tantalising and subversive force." (5)

"Cavendish used genre in her writings of the 1650s as a means of articulating her powerlessness in the face of what I shall come to define as a "triple exile". That is, it will become apparent that she is exiled not only in a legislative sense (by being married to a man who was politically designated a delinquent and banished) but in two other interrelated senses, too. She is analogously exiled firstly, as a woman trying to write in a hostile culture (thanks not least to Stansby and his peers) when this was seen as promiscuously transgressive, and secondly as a royalist maintaining and promoting the prohibited aesthetic of theatricality in various forms of her writing." (5)

exile: in 1650s, what we now see as temporary "must, at the time, have felt like an awful permanency, with all of the feelings of dejection and fear that accompany such a situation" (6)

her voice, "because of the triple exile, was subversive almost as soon as it was articulated" (7)

"For Cavendish's generic dissimulations to work effectively she needs some of her readers to come to her texts expecting a degree of rigidity, and others to read through that, to see the text as flexible, and to decipher some of what ti conceals. In other words, in Natures Pictures, or more specifically in the short story in it, Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, the reader expects to encounter one genre but actually they may discover that, for very specific political reasons, Cavendish has reinvented or rediscovered the romance genre's plastic potential. If, as Bakhtin argues, 'studying other genres is analogous to studying dead languages', then what Cavendish does in her use of genre is to find an idiolect informed by the peculiar personal and political circumstances of her life in the 1650s." (9)

in royalist literary sensibilities, civil wars marked move from epic to novelistic discourse (crushing of epic pasts) (9-10)

"in her hands genre is less a prescriptive force than a modulation which alters the generic code from which it is a departure, or of which it is a version" (10)

contemporary opinions of Cavendish (12); critical reactions to her work (13)

linking Assaulted to the Dryden-Davenant Tempest of 1667; conerns of "usurpation, involuntary exile, construction of a social utopia which in fact has dystopic elements and, in keeping with the speculations of the new science, the possibility of the existence of non-corporeal entities" (15); "The enchanted imagined isle, be it that of Cavenant's imagination or Cavendish's, is a space wherein the disenfranchised have the power to experiment with different versions of rule and absolutism." (15)

In Assaulted, Cavendish creates "a figure of an heroic woman -- a creation which exceeded the bounds of her text and which she wished to be applied to her self, too." (16); Ulyssean story; creation of a woman orator, reworking the figure of the Homeric Penelope