Recommendations
Books Like The Female Quixote
Best books to read after The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox
Readers who love The Female Quixote — Lennox's comic novel about a young woman whose reading of French romances has made her believe real life works like fiction — will enjoy these works of novel-as-satire, women and reading, and the great tradition of literary self-consciousness.
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Buy on AmazonNorthanger Abbey
by Jane Austen
The most direct descendant of The Female Quixote — Catherine Morland's Gothic delusions from reading too many Ann Radcliffe novels replicate Arabella's romance delusions exactly; Austen knew Lennox's novel and Northanger Abbey is its greatest tribute.
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Buy on AmazonDon Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
The original model — Lennox's title announces the debt; Don Quixote's chivalric delusions from reading too many romances are the template for Arabella's romance delusions; reading Cervantes alongside Lennox shows how the satirical novel-of-reading tradition works.
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Buy on AmazonEmma
by Jane Austen
The companion novel about a woman whose powerful imagination misreads the people around her — Emma Woodhouse's social errors are a more realistic version of Arabella's romance-world delusions; both novels are about the comedy and cost of a heroine's confident misinterpretation of reality.
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Buy on AmazonPamela
by Samuel Richardson
The contemporary novel whose conventions The Female Quixote implicitly parodies — Richardson's epistolary account of virtue rewarded by marriage was the dominant fiction of the 1740s, and Lennox's Arabella (whose romance-world virtue is similarly rewarded) reads as a comic commentary on Richardson's method.
- 5Buy on Amazon
Arabella
by Manon Lescaut (trans. various)
One of the French heroic romances that Arabella is reading — Madeleine de Scudéry's romances (Artamène, Clélie) are the books that have driven Arabella to her delusions; reading a few pages of Scudéry gives the full flavour of what Lennox is parodying.
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Buy on AmazonThe History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
by Samuel Johnson
Johnson reportedly wrote the final chapter of The Female Quixote, and his own philosophical tale (written in a single week in 1759) shares Lennox's interest in the gap between fiction's consolations and reality's disappointments; a natural companion from the same literary circle.
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Buy on AmazonBelinda
by Maria Edgeworth
The successor novel from the generation after Lennox — Edgeworth's 1801 novel about a young woman navigating fashionable society and learning to distinguish sense from sentiment continues The Female Quixote's tradition of the satirical novel of female education.
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Buy on AmazonThe Adventures of Roderick Random
by Tobias Smollett
The companion picaresque novel from the same decade — Smollett's 1748 novel deploys the same satirical energy as Lennox but from a male perspective, offering a contrasting picture of how the fiction of adventure shapes a young person's expectations of the world.
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