Pure Wit

The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish

My first book, a biography of Magaret Cavendish, First Duchess of Newcastle, was published by Head of Zeus (UK) in September 2023, and Pegasus Books (US) in January 2024.

Born in 1623, Cavendish was a polymath: one of the first English women to publish under her own name, and one of the earliest female philosophers and scientists. She published her first book, Poems and Fancies, in 1653, and wrote about everything from the position of women to the nature of atoms until her death in 1673.

Pure Wit was reviewed in The Telegraph (5 stars), The Times, The Observer, The Financial Times, the Spectator, and Country Life. It was praised as being “erudite and entertaining”, and a “blazing” biography which does Cavendish proud. It was a Spectator and History Today book of the year for 2023, and I was featured on BBC Radio 4 Front Row and BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking.

In the US, it received starred reviews in both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly, and large-scale reviews in both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times wrote “through piles of research Peacock comes across like an energetic arrival to a musty bedchamber, flinging open the windows to let new light in and plumping up the pillows”.