Like most seventeenth-century girls, Margaret Cavendish received a paltry education, but this shy, eccentric, aristocratic girl was blessed with a curious mind, a love of writing and a longing for fame. Imposter syndrome could easily have stopped her hand; instead, she became the first woman in Britain to publish a string of pioneering books and forge a career as an author. Her prolific writings – including scientific poems on the theory of atomism and her philosophical, proto-feminist, genre-busting novella The Blazing World – were considered so ‘unwomanly’ that her contemporaries called her mad.