Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, a 17th-century English author, wrote about her conflictual relationship with food in an interesting series of letters. Lady Cavendish was a cultivated woman and a keen writer: she authored poems, novels, plays, philosophical and scientific essays and faced the admiration, but also the scorn of her contemporaries. Her letters, written to a fictional alter ego, as it was quite common among female authors of her time, are introduced by a self-dedicated poem and by a further dedication to the Duke of Newcastle, her husband.
Lady Cavendish uses the theme of food and domestic chores to set herself apart from other women and to identify herself as an intellectual, hence as someone above such menial occupations, thanks to the unconventional education received from her mother.
Through the epistolary, an articulated metaphor of everyday life takes shape, a rhetoric which centres on the theme of body and food and is in constant and ambiguous imbalance between the all-encompassing desire to possess reality through its assimilation, and the rejection of it because of satiety and disgust.
