 Here the suggestion is that Cavendish had to expend an unusual sum of money to have her books printed and that those books are an adornment on library shelves. Charleton also makes clear that Cavendish need have no fear of being plagiarized. Other scholars and librarians were similarly dismissive, and with the exception of the case of Joseph Glanvill, a common denominator across the letters that Cavendish received in response is that there is almost no attempt to engage with her philosophical arguments and positions, and little evidence of their having been read (Cunning 2022). Unfortunately and sadly for her and for us, Cavendish was not able to participate in a philosophical back-and-forth with her contemporaries. When they would not critically correspond with her in print, she engaged their views critically in the form of a correspondence between herself and a fictional third  person.[2]  Cavendish wanted to secure a wide correspondence – “out of a love to Truth, and to make my own opinions the more intelligible, which cannot better be done then by arguing and comparing other mens opinions with them. …For a Philosopher or Philosopheress is not produced on a  sudden.”[3]  According to Cavendish, no one is a philosopher in a vacuum, just as no one is a military general, or barrister, or mathematician, or coach. To develop the skills that are part and parcel of philosophical inquiry, and to engage in philosophical debate itself, one needs interlocutors, and one needs to be seen as a potential authority. But the people in her surrounding environment were not going to comply. She left her books on the shelf in the hope that the self-same work might be far more impactful in a future generation.