| Summary: | Despite being the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society, Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) was denied membership. Her exclusion from these inner circles prevented her from participating in rigorous debates about her work and the work of her contemporaries. Although she was not invited into these conversations, she nevertheless entered them by imagining the kinds of objections her opponents would raise and publishing her responses in the form of an inner discourse. Inner discourse, here, describes a written dialogue where an author argues with themselves. This paper explores Cavendish’s use of inner discourse across three genres: philosophical prose, letter writing, and science-fiction. Ultimately, I argue that inner discourse as a literary device, for Cavendish, serves not only as a way to overcome social barriers, but also as an argument, by demonstration, against members of the Royal Society who believed that natural philosophy should be done primarily through experiments.
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