 There are two reasons why it is important to mention the marriage of Margaret Lucas and William Cavendish. One is that William regularly organized and hosted meetings of the “Cavendish Circle” in the 1640s, and attendees included such seventeenth-century giants as Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, and Kenelm Digby (Hutton 1997a, 422–3; Whitaker 2002, 92–4; Clucas 1994, 256–64). Margaret attended many of these meetings, though we do not know the extent to which she participated. The second reason why it is important to mention the marriage of Margaret to William is that in the mid-seventeenth-century it was uncommon for a publisher to print the philosophical and scientific work of a woman. Margaret Cavendish was a sufficiently brilliant and impressive writer that she was able to publish some of her work without assistance (Whitaker 2002, 154), including her very first work [Poems and Fancies, 1653], but her more philosophical writings were published with the assistance of her well-connected husband. At the time women were not taken very seriously as philosophers, and there was not a large market for the work of a woman philosopher to be distributed and discussed. Margaret was extremely proactive about mailing copies of her philosophical monographs to scholars and to libraries in England and beyond, along with requests for commentary and continued correspondence, but the replies that she received tended to be very dismissive. For example, William Charleton wrote back to her that