Friendship between the Empress and the Duchess

Friendship between the Empress and the Duchess is the novel’s sustaining bond between two women who meet across worlds as sovereign and author, adviser and imagined companion. It begins in intellectual service, deepens through candid conversation and mutual admiration, and ends not in possession but in a deliberate respect for each woman’s separate life and domain. Their Platonick intimacy becomes a model of imaginative fellowship: the Empress can create worlds, but she will not use that power to dispossess her friend.

A Spirit Summoned as Scribe

After the Empress has sought news of her native world through Immaterial Spirits, she asks for a writer whose work rests on sense and reason. The Duchess’s soul is recommended, and the Empress calls for her. Their first meeting is affectionate: the Empress embraces and greets her with a spiritual kiss, then asks whether she can write. The Duchess explains that her handwriting resembles characters more than well-formed letters, but the Empress proposes that her secretaries learn it and make a fair copy. The arrangement makes the Duchess not merely a visitor but a prospective collaborator in the Empress’s intellectual project.

That project is the Cabbala, and the Duchess immediately tests the Empress’s confidence in spiritual instruction. She advises that a Jewish sage would be a better guide, warning that created spirits are not all-knowing and may be ignorant of matters the Empress hopes to understand. When the Empress considers other kinds of Cabbala, the Duchess argues that scriptural mysteries need not be multiplied: natural reason can teach what may be known of nature, moral life rests on fearing God and loving one’s neighbor, and government turns on reward and punishment. The exchange establishes the friendship’s characteristic freedom. The Duchess does not merely flatter an imperial patron; she counsels her to abandon an undertaking she considers unnecessary and potentially misleading.

Inquiry, Knowledge, and Counsel

Their intellectual closeness is sharpened by a difference in authority. The Empress has already questioned the Immaterial Spirits about their vehicles, motion, memory, and knowledge. They tell her that created spirits have no general or absolute knowledge, that spirits move through corporeal vehicles, and that their foreknowledge depends on observing and comparing past and present actions. When the Duchess cautions that spirits can be ignorant, she draws on the same limitation the Empress has heard from them, but turns it into practical advice: supernatural interlocutors should not be mistaken for infallible teachers.

The friendship also connects the novel’s philosophical disputes to its account of authorship. Earlier, the Empress describes Nature as one infinite, self-moving body, divided into parts that continually change through composition and division. In the spirit discussions, the Duchess’s practical insistence on sense and reason takes its place alongside such speculative questions without pretending to settle every mystery. The women can share a world of inquiry while leaving room for disagreement, and the Empress’s request for counsel gives the Duchess a voice that is neither an imperial command nor a spirit’s supposed revelation.

Love Without Possession

During their voyage together, the Duchess wonders why the Empress, having discovered a passage between worlds, has not used it to enrich her birthplace or her family. The Empress replies that wealth inflames covetousness: people do not become content when they gain riches, but desire still more. The Duchess offers a different account, suggesting that scarcity makes people eager for wealth; yet she clarifies that she wants no fortune for herself. She would welcome riches only for her husband’s descendants, and says that she desires no more than the wealth her husband possessed before the Civil Wars. Her modesty is not a rejection of attachment: she values her husband and his posterity, but does not treat friendship with the Empress as a route to personal acquisition.

The discussion turns from riches to the Empress’s power to confer them. She promises that if a passage can be found, the Duchess and her husband will have wealth and long life, and declares that she loves the Duchess so well she would make her as great and powerful a monarchess as herself. The offer expresses devotion in the language of sovereignty, but the Duchess answers that she values the Empress’s love above anything in nature. The pair recognize the immense asymmetry between imperial capacity and worldly need without converting affection into a bargain: the gift is offered, not demanded, and the Duchess’s gratitude is not a claim on the Empress’s dominion.

Singularity, Virtue, and Authorship

In conversation, the Empress asks why the Duchess takes such delight, when joined to her body, in being singular in dress, behavior, and discourse. The Duchess admits that her manner is extravagant and unlike the ordinary, but defends her ambition not to imitate others. She would rather be imitated than imitate, and would rather appear worse through singularity than better by following the mode. This principle makes her a distinctive companion to a ruler whose world is organized around unity: the Duchess values a self-fashioned difference that cannot be reduced to public approval.

The Empress suggests that, without her high social rank, the world might call such singularity vanity. The Duchess says she does not care about the censure of this or any other age, and grounds her confidence instead in her virtue and chastity, which her acquaintances and servants could attest to. When the Empress challenges her for pleading in her writings on behalf of dishonest and wicked people, the Duchess replies that she does so to show her wit, not her nature. Their exchange gives friendship room for frank interrogation: admiration does not prevent either woman from questioning how the other’s public work relates to her character.

The Duchess’s creative independence also shapes the pair’s shared literary interests. The Emperor asks whether methodical, artificial plays are good; the Duchess distinguishes what suits the judgment or fashion of an age from what she herself considers good, arguing that such plays make a nursery for whining lovers rather than a school for wise and well-behaved people. The Emperor prefers natural descriptions and a theatre that makes wise men. The Duchess offers to arrange the theatre and write plays for the Blazing-World, and notes that its varied inhabitants could perform farce. This promise extends her relationship with the royal couple into collaborative world-making, where her wit is invited to alter the culture of their realm.

Parting and the Limits of Rule

The Emperor and Empress ask the Duchess’s soul to stay until she has organized their theatre and supplied plays and farces. She declines for the present, asking leave to return to her native world because she longs to be with her dear lord and husband; she promises to visit again after a short time. The rulers grant her departure with difficulty, but her choice is respected. When the Duchess returns to her body, she tells her husband about the Empress’s kindness and the events of the journey, including the subjection of other monarchs to tribute on behalf of the Empress’s native country. The friendship therefore spans both a private longing to reunite with her husband and a political world whose power she has witnessed firsthand.

At the novel’s close, the authorial voice draws a boundary around the Empress’s imaginative empire. She says the Blazing-World already has an Empress, her dear Platonick friend, who rules with wisdom and conduct; she will not disturb that government, still less depose her friend, for the sake of another. If she wants another realm for another friend, she will create one. The declaration makes the friendship more than a close personal attachment: it limits ambition. The Duchess can imagine and author worlds of her own, while the Empress can command a world, yet neither woman’s imaginative or political power cancels the other’s. Their bond endures precisely because affection does not require possession.