Duchess

The Duchess is the soul of Margaret Newcastle, separated from her body and summoned into the Blazing-World to help its Empress write a Cabbala. She becomes far more than a spiritual secretary: she challenges the limits of supernatural knowledge, gives practical religious and political advice, and shares a sustaining friendship with the Empress. Her insistence on independent judgment and her preference for peace, honesty, and imaginative creation make her both the Empress’s confidante and a figure for the author’s own power to make worlds.

Identity and Arrival

The Duchess enters the Blazing-World as an incorporeal visitor from her own world. After meeting the Empress’s Immaterial Spirits, the Empress asks them to find a scribe for a proposed Cabbala. The Spirits reject the prospect of using famous ancient or modern male writers: those they name are too attached to their own opinions or too self-conceited to serve as a woman’s secretary. Instead, they recommend the Duchess as a plain, rational writer guided by sense and reason. The Empress chooses her, remarking that the Emperor has no reason to be jealous of a friend of her own sex.

The Duchess arrives with a spiritual kiss and an immediate qualification: her handwriting consists more of characters than well-formed letters, and readers must learn to decipher it. The Empress is not seeking a legible hand so much as the reasoned writing for which the Duchess was recommended. Their first exchange establishes a collaboration that is affectionate but not deferential; the Duchess will serve the Empress best by advising her, not merely carrying out her wishes.

Counsel on the Cabbala

The Empress proposes a Jewish Cabbala, but the Duchess warns that the project is likely to mislead. If the Empress wants instruction in Jewish mysteries, she should seek the soul of Moses or a chief Rabbi of the Tribe of Levi; otherwise, relying on spirits risks grave error. Spirits, she insists, are created beings with limited knowledge, not authorities with general or absolute understanding of the Creator’s mysteries. This advice gives practical force to an earlier disclosure by the Empress’s Immaterial Spirits: they cannot know everything, and even their memories fail for events that have not been recorded.

The Duchess then considers the Empress’s alternatives one by one. A mystical interpretation of Scripture, she argues, offers no advantage over its literal sense and may encourage readers to interpret according to personal fancy. A philosophical Cabbala would add confusion to the infinite number of things already beyond human understanding. A moral Cabbala is unnecessary because its central precepts are to fear God and love one’s neighbour. A political Cabbala is equally superfluous: government rests on reward and punishment. Each refusal is specific, grounded in the practical limits of human knowledge and the needs of the intended readers. The Duchess does not claim that inquiry itself is improper; she argues that elaborate systems cannot supply knowledge or guidance they do not possess.

Her advice also contrasts with the Empress’s earlier confidence in her own natural philosophy. The Empress had dismissed the Ape-men’s searches for first principles in fire and chemical ingredients, declaring Nature to be one infinite, self-moving body whose parts perpetually change through composition and division. The Duchess’s counsel to the Empress works in a similar spirit of restraint: neither experimental procedures nor mystical interpretations should be mistaken for access to a complete account of Nature or God.

Friendship, Virtue, and Separation

The Duchess’s standing with the Empress is based on the trustworthiness of her judgment. When she is about to leave the Blazing-World, the Empress asks her to advise on a government increasingly troubled by disputes among its different peoples. The Duchess recommends a return to the original arrangement: one sovereign, one religion, one law, and one language, so the world can act as a united family rather than fracture into competing powers and beliefs. Her advice follows from the Empress’s own report that the realm had been more peaceful before its government changed.

Elsewhere, the Duchess defends her distinctive dress, conduct, and speech as a refusal to imitate other people. She admits that her singularity is extravagant, but values it over conformity, even when conformity might bring greater approval. In the same conversation, she argues that her virtue and chastity are demonstrable through the testimony of people who knew her and served in her household. She explains that defending wicked people in her writings displays her wit, not her nature. These exchanges make her self-presentation a deliberate distinction between literary invention and personal character.

The Duchess also joins the Empress in trying to reconcile the Duke of Newcastle and Fortune. When Fortune angrily rejects Honesty’s plain judgment and leaves, the attempt fails; Honesty rebukes the Duchess for seeking Fortune’s favour, while the Empress objects that Honesty lacks Prudence. The Duchess weeps as she explains that she neither distrusts divine blessings nor depends on Fortune, but only wants her Lord to have no powerful enemies. Afterward, she asks leave to return to him. The Empress grants it on the condition that the Duchess visit again when she can, promising reciprocal visits; the Immaterial Spirits likewise say they will try to make peace between Fortune and the Duke.

Journey and Return

The Duchess later accompanies the Empress’s soul during the voyage back to the Blazing-World. She asks why the Empress, now able to cross between worlds spiritually, has not enriched her own family, though she possesses enough wealth to enrich the whole world. The Empress replies that riches drive people toward mutual destruction, and that greed grows with wealth rather than being satisfied by it. The Duchess disagrees about the cause of worldly covetousness, attributing it to scarcity, but says she herself would want no more than the wealth her husband possessed before the Civil Wars, and only for his posterity. If a passage between the worlds existed, she would prefer the life-preserving Elixir of the Blazing-World to gold and jewels; as a soul, however, she cannot use a material substance that cannot cross with her.

The Empress offers to make the Duchess as powerful a monarchess as herself, an offer the Duchess receives gratefully but does not pursue. Their different orientations remain plain: the Empress imagines transferring material wealth and political rank, while the Duchess’s concern is her husband and his descendants. The Duchess’s soul returns with the Empress to the Blazing-World, where the Emperor rejoices at his wife’s safe arrival. He has built magnificent stables and riding houses during her absence and asks the Duchess about the Duke’s buildings and horses. One double stable holds a hundred horses on each side; its golden structure is ornamented with agate, cornelian, amber, mother-of-pearl, crystal, and turquoise, while the riding house has a floor of finely sifted golden sand. The lavish display makes the material divide between the worlds concrete: the Duchess can describe what her Lord might have enjoyed, but cannot carry it across.

After further conversations, the Duchess asks to return to her husband. The Emperor and Empress ask her to stay long enough to arrange their theatre and compose plays and farces, but she longs to be with her Lord and promises to come back after a short time. Once restored to her body, she tells him of her travels, the Empress’s kind words about him, the submission of the foreign monarchs to the King of Esfi, and the Blazing-World’s horses and magnificent buildings. She says that if a passage existed, he could receive horses and building materials, as well as gold. The Duke replies that he regrets the absence of such a passage and that good fortune has always been obstructed for him.

Authorship and World-Making

The Duchess’s visits make friendship a vehicle for writing and counsel, but the book finally places her within a larger act of imaginative authorship. The work presents the Blazing-World as a world made from the rational parts of the author’s mind, more readily created than the conquests of Alexander or Caesar and without their extensive destruction. Its author takes greater pleasure and glory in making worlds than those monarchs took in conquest, and declares a preference for peace over war, wit over policy, and honesty over beauty.

The Duchess’s singularity and literary role prepare for the choice of Honest Margaret Newcastle as the preferred figure in that created world. The author will not exchange her for the figures of celebrated conquerors and heroes. Readers who like the world may imagine themselves its subjects in their minds; those who do not wish to submit may create worlds of their own. Yet the author distinguishes this imaginative freedom from political usurpation: the Blazing-World already has an Empress, her dear Platonic friend, and the author will not disturb or depose her. The Duchess thus represents both the reach and the limit of imaginative sovereignty: she helps make and advise a fictional world, but the Empress remains its ruler, while the Duchess’s deepest attachment continues to be her Lord in her own world.