"[3] The Blazing World opens with a sonnet written by the author's husband, William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which celebrates her imaginative powers.

The first “romancical” section describes a young woman from the Kingdom of ESFI (an acronym for England, Scotland, France, and Ireland) being kidnapped onto a boat by a spurned lover.

The gods, unsatisfied by the kidnapping, blow the boat to the North Pole, where all of the crew except the young woman die of hypothermia.

In the Blazing World, the Duchess mounts an impassioned defense of her husband at a court hearing with the virtues, although the outcome of the legal process is inconclusive.

[5] The work was initially published as a companion piece to Cavendish's Observations upon Experimental Philosophy[6] and thus functioned as an imaginative component to what was otherwise a reasoned endeavor in 17th-century science.

[6] Scholar Nicole Pohl of Oxford Brookes University has argued that Cavendish was accurate in her categorisation of the work as "a 'hermaphroditic' text".

Pohl points to Cavendish's confrontations of seventeenth century norms, with regard to such categories as science, politics, gender, and identity.

"[7] Northeastern University professor Marina Leslie remarks that readers have noted that The Blazing World serves as a departure from the habitually male-dominated field of utopian writing.

"[11] University of Georgia professor Sujata Iyengar points out the importance of the fact that The Blazing World is clearly fictional, a stark contrast to the scientific nature of the work it is attached to.

Iyengar notes that writing a work of fiction allowed Cavendish to create a new world in which she could conceive of any possible reality.

Such liberty, Iyengar argues, allows Cavendish to explore ideas of rank, gender, and race that directly clash with commonly held beliefs about servility in her era.

"[13] The University of Memphis professor Catherine Gimelli Martin compares The Blazing World to another early example of the genre: Thomas More’s Utopia.

To eliminate potential division and maintain social harmony in the society the text imagines, Cavendish constructs a monarchical government.

[15] Unlike a democratic government, Cavendish believes only an absolute sovereignty can maintain social unity and stability because the reliance on one authority eliminates separations of power.

[18] In The Blazing World, Cavendish even directly mentions his name while cataloguing famous writers: "Galileo, Gassendus, Descartes, Helmont, Hobbes, H. More, etc".

In China Miéville's Un Lun Dun, a library book entitled A London Guide for the Blazing Worlders is mentioned, suggesting that travel between the two worlds is not all one-way.

In 2014, Siri Hustvedt published the novel The Blazing World, in which she describes Harriet Burden's brilliant but convoluted attempts at gaining recognition from the male-dominated New York City art scene.

Nearing the end of her life, Burden is comforted by Cavendish's work: "I am back to my blazing mother Margaret" (p. 348), she writes in her notebook.