She is the author of a collection of hybrid prose pieces, Attempts at a Life, which Daniel Handler in Entertainment Weekly called 'indescribably beautiful,' and an experimental novel, S P R A W L, a finalist for the Believer Book Award. “Danielle Dutton engagingly embellishes the life of Margaret the First, the infamousDuchess of Newcastle–upon–Tyne.” - Vanity Fairĭanielle Dutton’s fiction has appeared in magazines such as Harper’s, BOMB, Fence, and Noon.

Dutton’s work serves to emphasize the ambiguities of archival proof, restoring historical narratives to what they have perhapsalways already been: provoking and serious fantasies,convincing reconstructions, true fictions.”-Lucy Ives, The New Yorker 'In Margaret the First, there is plenty of room for play. Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, it is a gorgeous and wholly new approach to imagining the life of a historical woman. Margaret the First is very much a contemporary novel set in the past. Yet Margaret was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of London-a mainstay of the Scientific Revolution-and the last for another two hundred years. After the War, her work earned her both fame and infamy in England: at the dawn of daily newspapers, she was 'Mad Madge,' an original tabloid celebrity. As the English Civil War raged on, Margaret met and married William Cavendish, who encouraged her writing and her desire for a career. As one of the Queen's attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, she was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when 'being a writer' was not an option open to women.

Margaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional 17th–century Duchess.

“The duchess herself would be delighted at her resurrection in Margaret the First.Dutton expertly captures the pathos of a woman whose happiness is furrowed with the anxiety of underacknowledgment.” -Katharine Grant, The New York Times Book Review One of Electric Literature's Best Novels of 2016.

The Door in the Lake by Nancy Butts