In the forward to Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges announced his dismal view of the very long book: “It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.”

Borges would have wildly applauded Danielle Dutton’s novel, Margaret The First, a slim 160 pages about the eccentric seventeenth-century writer and British Duchess Margaret Cavendish, one of the few female writers of her time. Dutton didn’t confine herself to a summary or commentary, but a bildungsroman, from Margaret’s early years as a dreamy, imaginative child to her life as a mature woman, an authoress.

To compress so much in so few pages seems an act of alchemy. But behind the magic are style techniques—including syntax, the tropes of synecdoche and metonymy, and punctuation—that twine together Margaret’s personal life with the details and events of 17^th century England.

Dutton’s left-branching sentences (the independent clause is not at the beginning of the sentence) are often long, spooling many ideas, or what Professor Brooks Landon calls “propositions,” a kind of basic statement that can’t be easily broken into constituent propositions. In the following example, Dutton efficiently gives us the landscape of Antwerp in one sentence.

In black beneath the potted lime trees, an arbor heavy with roses, I listened as the cathedral with its lacy spire chimed at every hour, south to the reedy countryside, north to the sea, over monasteries with stained glass, over Antwerp’s clean broad streets and the leading publishing house in Europe—printing in Syriac, Hebrew, even musical notes—over lindens and canals and savage-looking orchids.

Rather than give an elaborate description of Margaret Cavendish’s house in Paris, Dutton relies on synecdoche, a trope that substitutes an attribute of the object for the whole. “It was: the gate, those crows, some soggy lindens, a fountain, and I was home.”

As for time, it, too, can efficiently be dealt with: “So passed two or three years.”

She also employs lists, often created with a semicolon, which efficiently strings many images together, painting a full, rich picture.

When Princess Marie of Mantua married the ancient King of Poland (incontinent and crippled by gout), all Paris lined the streets to watch: mounted soldiers in Turkish jackets, their horses’ skin dyed red; footguards in yellow regalia; Polish seigneurs in a wealth of jewels, despite a lack of taste.

To delve further into her novel, I had the good fortune of speaking to Dutton about her writing style.

I read that one of your influences is Virginia Woolf, and in particular, Woolf’s rhythm. How did you create rhythm in your writing?

Syntactic rhythm is something I don’t consciously work at. I don’t know how to talk about it, as it’s just so integral to how I write (or how I hear). Having said that, the rhythms in Margaret the First are very different from the rhythms in SPRAWL, my first novel, so there must be something that’s guiding me from the outset toward a certain style. In the case of Margaret the First, I think it was this idea of writing toward the wonderful lushness of the seventeenth century (its prose, its dresses, its gardens). With SPRAWL, on the other hand, I was writing toward the glittering flatness of the bourgeois suburb, and using contemporary still life photography as a guide.

Margaret The First is a slender 160 pages. When you first started writing, did you know it would be this length? If not, what was the length of the first draft?

When I start writing a book I generally have no idea what it will be, in any sense. I didn’t even think this would be a book about Margaret Cavendish per se, at least not when I started. Length isn’t a major concern for me, except to say that as a reader (at least of contemporary fiction) I tend to prefer slender books.

What was your process of tightening your early draft?

When I tighten I’m usually cutting any language that isn’t doing enough work. There might be a line doing necessary character work, for example, but it needs to be doing something else too, something with image, say, or rhythm or sound.

In terms of punctuation, you like to use semicolons, a favorite of Virginia Woolf. Why do you like them? 

Semicolons are conceptually interesting to me in that they seem to get at something integral in terms of the way language moves through my mind—not just a pause (comma) but not a full stop either (period). They offer this lingering in silence or thought or doubt. Also, I like lists.

Why do you like lists?

I suppose I think lists can do a lot of different work. They can be funny, beautiful, unsettling. And they make language/a story feel very much like an object, which I find interesting.

On p. 91 of Margaret the First, in a section called “The Restoration,” you switch from first person, Margaret’s point of view, to third person. When you wrote in third person, how did the writing change for you?

Actually, I started the book in third. The first thing I wrote was the first section of the final part of the book, where Margaret has just finished A Description of a New World Called the Blazing World. That near-interiority, which is quite swirling and lyrical, that was the home base for the book’s prose. I only came to write in first person several years later, and that did dramatically change the book’s course—unsurprisingly, it opened up Margaret’s consciousness in a completely new way.

There are so many great sentences in your novel. Can you pick two or three that you particular love? What do you love about them?

No one sentence comes mind, so I will open the book at random…  What I noticed was that it wasn’t so much individual sentences that caught my eye/ear but paragraphs, the rhythms between and across the sentences. Okay, here’s one I like: “Or else I went in slippers to the gallery, long and narrow and lit by windows with colored heralds that painted the polished wooden floor and paneled walls when the sun shone.” I like that this sentence makes you wait for it; it’s almost awkward in its breathlessness, but the repeated “L” and “P” and “S” sounds also make it quite pleasing to pass through, I think. Then, too, the image it paints is just pretty.

Nina Schuyler’s latest novel, The Translator, was published by Pegasus Books. Her first novel, The Painting, was published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.