At eighteen she was appointed maid of honor to Queen Henrietta Maria and accompanied her to France. There, at twenty, she became the second wife of the Duke of Newcastle, a nobleman thirty-two years older than herself, but who was, she says, "the onely Person I ever was in love with." She was with him during the trying years of his absence from England and it was during this difficult and tedious period that literature became her resource. Her publications began with _Philosophical Fancies_ in 1653 and closed with _Grounds of Natural Philosophy_ in 1668, during which period she wrote nearly twelve folio volumes. The portions of her work concerning which she felt the greatest measure of self-congratulation were her studies in natural philosophy. Her _Philosophical Fancies_ of 1653 was expanded in 1655, and in 1663 received its final form as _Philosophical and Physical Opinions_. Of all her books this was "her best beloved and favourite." But the quality on which she chiefly prides herself is the very one that nullifies her work. Originality is her great boast, an originality so pronounced as to refuse to base its deductions on the writings of previous thinkers. Her husband substantiates her claim. He says that all her philosophical fancies are spun out of her own brain, and that, if she does not use the technical terms of philosophers, it is because her language is her own too. She has scorned to talk with any "profest scholar" to learn his phraseology. "She did never impe her high-flying Phancies, with any old broken Fethers out of any university."[96] She says herself that she could never "afford board-room to other people's ideas lest the legitimate offspring of her own brain should be crowded out."[97] In Part IV, "On the Motion of the Bodie," we find that the Duchess has never studied anatomy, but this apparent disqualification does not prove inhibitory. In _An Epistle to the Reader_ she explains the situation: