Danielle Dutton, Margaret the First (Catapult, March 2016): Just the fact that Margaret Lucas Cavendish was a well-published author who wrote under her own name in the 17th century makes her remarkable. But consider: her utopian novel The Blazing World was one of the first works of sci-fi. She also published poetry, plays, letters, and a memoir. She was the first woman invited into the Royal Society of London (they wouldn’t invite another one into the ranks again for two centuries). She admitted she wrote for fame, was a regular in the tabloids (where she was dubbed “Mad Madge”), and designed and made her own clothes. She and her husband, William, maintained a brilliantly equitable marriage, sticking together despite the constant political turmoil that tore their lives apart. In Margaret the First (a royal title Cavendish gave herself in the preface of her novel), Danielle Dutton writes about the real woman, but in a way that’s far too imaginative to be tagged as “historical fiction.” The cover features a lady with stars tattooed on her cheek and a dress made of blooming vegetation; the Margaret you find in the pages, though historically accurate, also resembles this magical being. As novelist Kathryn Davis observed, it’s “the story of every woman artist who has burst loose the constraints of her particular moment in history to create ‘a new world called the blazing world.’” Dutton (who’s also a Washington University creative writing professor and founder of the marvelous press Dorothy), reads from the novel at Left Bank Books (399 Euclid) on March 7.
James Edward Deeds, The Electric Pencil: Drawings From State Hospital No. 3 (Princeton Architectural Press, March 2016): In 2011, a Missouri artist made his debut at a New York art fair. And there was lots of buzz—even though he had just 283 pieces in his oeuvre and was known only as “The Electric Pencil,” a nickname based on an inscription on one of the drawings. They were all made on scratch ledger paper from State Hospital No. 3 in Nevada, Missouri, and bound into a handmade book, which was found on a trash pile by a 14-year-old Springfield boy in 1970. That boy kept the book for 37 years, finally selling it to a Kansas City art collector. The artist’s identity remained a mystery until a few years ago, when James Edward Deeds’ nieces spotted a story in the Springfield News-Leader about Harris Diamant, a New York art dealer who’d acquired the work and was desperately trying to discover the identity of its creator. Along with the story, the paper ran several large photos of the drawings; Deeds’ nieces recognized them immediately. Abused by his father as a child and likely suffering from schizophrenia, Deeds spent nearly all his life in mental hospitals, where he battled boredom and loneliness (and the pain of weekly electroconvulsive therapy) by making art: portraits of huge-eyed ladies and gentlemen in anachronistic attire; big cats and deer with the same large, soft eyes; cars that are futuristic but also Model T–like; and riverboats, including one that is part giant black snake. Unlike other outsider artists such as Henry Darger, Deeds’ vision was otherworldly but not violent or dark. This book reproduces all of his lovingly drafted, gorgeously colored drawings in the original order, giving you a sense of what it was like to flip through the original portfolio.
