There are two major threads in the 350-year history of Cavendish’s literary reputation, both deriving from views of her life. In the first thread, she was a highly virtuous woman and a passionate writer, though what she wrote suffered from her poor education and lack of discipline. Her virtue was manifest in her biography of her husband and her passion, poor education, and lack of discipline apparent in her poetry. In the second and less-well-known thread, she had an eye for young men and included objectionable passages in her drama and poetry. Both threads are related to a set of categories historically used to evaluate women writers. Cavendish, thus, was like Katherine Philips who also was understood to be highly virtuous and like Aphra Behn who was thought to have written passionate but objectionable drama and verse. Largely outside of the major threads are observations offered by Samuel Pepys, who reacted to Cavendish as a celebrity. Her most important and nuanced critic was Virginia Woolf, who owed something to both threads and who wrote with a touch of irony. Evidence suggests that William Wordsworth and Horace Walpole knew and were influenced by Cavendish’s writing.

The assertion is often made that a particular stage play or film is characterized by truthfulness or is lacking therein. So, too, related assertions about honesty and authenticity, but I will focus on truth within the context of writing and acting. Glowing claims of truth found in publicity blurbs, of course, are generally to be taken with a grain of salt, but in other circumstances and, particularly where biofiction is concerned, a look at the topic can be useful. Such is very much the case when the application is to early modern women authors.

It is quite reasonable to say that dialogue either “rings true” or does not. The phrase in the TV and film industries for success is “on the nose.” Can we imagine the poet Veronica Franco actually saying the words spoken by Catherine McCormack in the 1998 film Dangerous Beauty? If so, then a feeling of truthfulness is achieved. Otherwise, we may have the impression that the character is saying something a little too far away from our understanding of our own world or our sense of sixteenth-century Italy. Accusations of outright dishonesty can involve elements of plot or character that are known by the viewer to be either distorted or omitted. Distortion is a consideration when a screenwriter hopes to attract the viewer's attention with, say, with an element of plot or character that is highly unlikely. In TV and film such an attempt is referred to as “jumping the shark.”

A surge in recent attention to the parameters of biofiction, thanks in large part to the pioneering work of Michael Lackey, has illuminated some of the tensions distinguishing critical reception of novels with that label. Indeed, it's not simply a matter of scholarship. When contemporary journalists respond to a literary genre with reporting that connects the challenges facing contemporary novelists with “ripped-from-the-headlines events,” their attention to the implications of biofiction has relevance for the general reader as well as the scholar. A case in point: Ron Charles, the Book World Critic for The Washington Post, broke a story in which the real lawyer Alan Dershowitz claimed a fictional lawyer had defamed him; Charles insisted that the “implications for novelists are very real.” Pointing out that novels that “borrow, embellish, and manipulate the details of well-known people's lives […] freely mingle fiction and nonfiction,” Charles drew a connection to the early modern world, where “the challenge of blending real and invented characters wasn't so theoretical for William Shakespeare,” whose powerful queen, Elizabeth I, might have responded definitively to a stage portrayal of her father (Charles).

Focusing on the distinctions between historical and biographical novels, Michael Lackey has argued that whereas “the ideal character of a historical novel,” according to Georg Lukács's 1937 definition, is “supposed to symbolically represent […] the objective social and political forces of the age,” biographical novelists “gravitate towards quirky characters that defy their age and function as forward-thinking agents of change” (2017, p. 4).