Justice & Law Quote by Margaret Cavendish

The sentence performs family harmony the way a court masque performs loyalty: lavishly, insistently, and with an eye to who might be watching. Cavendish piles up relations - brothers and sisters, then the in-laws, then even the children - as if the sheer breadth of agreement can substitute for proof. The syntax is social choreography: everyone in the household moves in step, across bloodlines and marriages, down to the next generation. That’s not just warmth; it’s a credential.

In Cavendish’s 17th-century world, a woman’s voice in print was already a provocation. One way to blunt the charge of immodesty or eccentricity was to frame oneself as embedded in proper kinship, endorsed by the people who supposedly know you best. “Agreed” matters as much as “affectionate”: she’s not merely loved, she’s validated. Even the children’s “agreeable natures” read like strategic evidence, implying that goodness is both recognized by innocents and reproducible as a family trait.

There’s also a quiet politics of legitimacy. In-laws are the test case, the skeptical jury you didn’t grow up with; their agreement suggests the harmony isn’t parochial or biased. The line becomes a soft rebuttal to gossip and faction, the period’s favorite sport. Cavendish is writing herself into safety: not pleading for acceptance, but building a chorus around her, so her singularity can appear, paradoxically, as consensus.