Wit & Attitude Quote by Margaret Cavendish

There is a sly self-defense tucked inside Cavendish's modesty: she concedes a lack of wit, then immediately refuses the more brutal category the world would happily assign a woman who speaks too boldly. The dash is doing political work. It breaks the sentence like a quick breath taken before pushing back, turning what could be read as a confession into a calibrated rebuttal.

“My wit was according to my years” is an argument for developmental legitimacy at a time when women’s intellect was treated as either ornamental or suspect. Cavendish, writing in an era that policed female authorship as vanity or disorder, anticipates the sneer: if she’s not dazzling, she must be deficient; if she is dazzling, she must be unnatural. Her phrasing slips between those traps. She claims reasonableness, not genius; growth, not defect.

The line also hints at her larger project: to secure a space where a woman can be taken seriously without performing impossible brilliance. Cavendish published under her own name, wrote extravagantly across genres, and cultivated a public persona that critics mocked as eccentric. This sentence reads like a preemptive note to those critics, a way of narrating her own capacity before others narrate it for her.

It works because it’s both humble and bristling. She accepts the timeline of learning while rejecting the verdict of stupidity, insisting that intellect is not a fixed trait but a life in progress. That’s a quietly radical demand: judge me as a mind becoming, not a woman failing.