1668

The 1668 date identifies the year in which A. Maxwell printed the work. It situates a book that crosses romance, philosophy, and fantasy within a single publication, while its own framing makes that combination part of a larger claim about women’s authorship and imaginative creation.

Publication and Form

The printed book presents the description of a new world as an appendix to the author’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. The author explains that the works share a sympathy and coherence, like two worlds joined at opposite poles, but that she separated material from the philosophical work because many women readers might not take pleasure in philosophical argument. The resulting book is described as having a romancical first part, a philosophical second, and a third part devoted to fancy. The publication date therefore belongs to a deliberately mixed form rather than to a single, narrowly defined genre.

Address to Women Readers

The author’s prefatory address presents the work to noble and worthy ladies as a gift drawn from her contemplations. She imagines the possibility that readers might enjoy these fancies and calls herself a happy creator if they do. The framing also connects literary invention to ambition: although the author says she lacks the power and opportunity to become a great conqueror, she has made a world of her own. The book’s imaginative achievement is thus introduced as a form of authorship and self-determination.

Learning, Authority, and Authorship

Within the fictional world, the Empress convenes learned groups to report on subjects including the Sun and Moon. Their accounts produce disagreement rather than settled certainty. Telescopes intensify disputes among observers, and the Empress ultimately orders them broken, judging that they fail to deliver reliable knowledge. This episode places the work’s presentation of inquiry alongside its interest in the limits of instruments and competing claims to authority.

The later spirit dialogues make that uncertainty explicit. The Immaterial Spirits acknowledge limits to their knowledge, including the distinction between present understanding and remembrance of the past. When the Empress proposes making a Cabbala, they disappear; after their return, she asks for a scribe. They recommend the Duchess of Newcastle’s soul, describing her writing as plain and rational. The Empress chooses her, and the Duchess advises against several proposed Cabbalas, arguing that neither spirits nor mortals possess unrestricted knowledge. The episode turns the Duchess into a participant in the imagined world while dramatizing the book’s interest in who can claim intellectual and spiritual authority.

Publication as World-Making

The epilogue makes the connection between print, imagination, and rule explicit. The author describes the Blazing-World and the philosophical world as composed from the rational parts of her mind, and contrasts this creation with the destruction associated with earthly conquerors. She declares that making these worlds gives her more delight than Alexander or Caesar gained from conquest. The date 1668 consequently marks not only the book’s appearance but the publication of a work that presents imaginative authorship as a rival, peaceful form of world-making.