Nina Auerbach’s work, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction, provides a valuable theoretical tool for interrogating the theme of women’s communities in war. She argues that “Union among women…is one of the unacknowledged fruits of war”.25 When the men from the Duke of Newcastle’s family went off to fight for the King, the women were left in a precarious situation. The Cavendish sisters created a female community which sustained them throughout the war and it was during the time when their home was being besieged that they wrote their play The Concealed Fancies.
Central to the work of Margaret Cavendish is her own theorising about war. In her prose work, The World’s Olio, she speculates on the need for a hierarchical order in society: “For every man living not according to his expence, which must needs make a disorder where there is an inequalitie of degrees, and not in expence”.26 In her play, The Sociable Companions, she presents a cynical postwar society where the cashiered soldiers try to come to terms with their redundancy after the bitter disappointment of being on the losing side in the war. Cavendish shows that the collapse of law and order sparks off moral bankruptcy in society.
In The Rover, Behn also refers to the redundant Cavaliers, who are living in exile on the continent. Although Behn and Cavendish were both influenced by the work of Hobbes, Behn adapted his theories in order to make her banished Cavaliers more lovable. It is important to note that, as Warren Cherniak points out, the libertines adapted Hobbes for their own purposes. He comments: