Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Cavendish

A line like this lands with the dry snap of someone who’s watched “respectability” smother people in real time. Cavendish isn’t knocking romance; she’s indicting an institution that, in 17th-century England, functioned less like a personal choice than a social reclassification. Marriage didn’t just change your address. It rewrote your legal identity, your public voice, your time, your body. For a woman in particular, the joke is that the punchline isn’t funny: wit dies not because love is dull, but because the conditions that let wit exist - privacy, leisure, a readership, the right to speak without consequence - get buried under duty.

Calling marriage a “grave or tomb” is pointedly redundant. A grave can be visited; a tomb is sealed. The doubling sharpens the claustrophobia, suggesting not only death but preservation in stone: you’re kept, displayed, remembered in the role you’re assigned. “Wit” here isn’t party banter. It’s mental agility, social critique, the dangerous talent for saying what you see. In a culture that prized women’s silence and punished their sharpness as immodesty, wit was already precarious; marriage makes it officially inappropriate.

Cavendish’s own career makes the barb sting. An aristocratic writer and intellectual outlier, she knew how easily a woman’s ideas could be treated as novelty, madness, or ornament. The line reads as self-defense and warning: the quickest way to neutralize a mind is to hand it a “proper” life.