Reading Order
The Female Quixote Reading Order
The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752) by Charlotte Lennox is one of the most delightfully odd and theoretically rich novels of the eighteenth century — a parody of the French heroic romance tradition (Scudéry, La Calprenède, d'Urfé) in which Arabella, a young woman raised in rural isolation whose only reading has been the aristocratic romance novels of the previous century, believes that real life operates according to the conventions of those novels: that every man who looks at her is secretly in love with her and plotting to abduct her, that rakes can be reformed by witnessing virtue in distress, and that her proper suitors must prove their love through years of servile devotion and chivalric adventure. The comedy comes from the gap between Arabella's romance-world assumptions and actual English eighteenth-century reality, and from the impossibility of anyone around her disabusing her of her delusions without being accused of insulting her. Samuel Johnson is reported to have written the final chapter, in which a clergyman finally breaks through Arabella's fantasy — which is simultaneously the most theologically serious and the funniest chapter in the book. Lennox's novel is read today as a key text for thinking about women, reading, and the dangers (and pleasures) of fiction, and it was enormously influential on Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.
Where to start
The Female Quixote (1752) — the Oxford World's Classics edition edited by Margaret Dalziel with an introduction by Margaret Anne Doody (1989; 2008) is the standard scholarly edition. Amanda Gilroy and Wil Verhoeven's Penguin Classics edition (2006) is also good. No prior knowledge of the French heroic romance tradition is required, though a page or two of Scudéry will help you understand exactly what Arabella is imitating.
Complete The Female Quixote Book List
- 1Buy
The Female Quixote (Oxford World's Classics)
Charlotte Lennox (ed. Margaret Dalziel, intro. Margaret Anne Doody)·2008·The standard scholarly edition — Doody's introduction is the best guide to Lennox's relationship to the romance tradition, to Cervantes, and to eighteenth-century debates about women and reading; essential notes. - 2Buy
The Female Quixote (Penguin Classics)
Charlotte Lennox (ed. Amanda Gilroy and Wil Verhoeven)·2006·The best affordable edition for general readers — Gilroy and Verhoeven's introduction emphasizes the novel's feminist dimensions and its reception history. - 3Buy
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes (trans. Edith Grossman)·2003·The model for Lennox's novel — the original story of a man driven mad by reading too many chivalric romances; reading Don Quixote illuminates everything Lennox is doing with Arabella, and Grossman's translation makes it as funny as it should be. - 4Buy
Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen·1817·Austen's Gothic parody is directly descended from The Female Quixote — Catherine Morland's Gothic delusions replicate Arabella's romance delusions in a later mode; the two novels are natural companions. - 5Buy
Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind
Susan Carlile·2018·The first major modern biography — Carlile traces Lennox's extraordinary career (friend of Johnson, Garrick, and Richardson; author of twelve books while struggling financially throughout her life) and the composition of The Female Quixote.
The Female Quixote — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Female Quixote about?
The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752) by Charlotte Lennox is a comic novel about Arabella, a young Englishwoman raised in rural isolation whose reading has consisted entirely of seventeenth-century French heroic romances (Scudéry, La Calprenède). Arabella believes that real life operates according to romance conventions — that all men who look at her are secretly in love with her, that abduction is a normal expression of devotion, that a proper suitor must prove his love through years of chivalric service. The comedy arises from the gap between Arabella's romance-world and actual eighteenth-century English reality, and from the novel's implicit argument about women, reading, and the power of fiction to shape (or distort) a woman's understanding of her own situation.
Is The Female Quixote a feminist novel?
The Female Quixote is legible as proto-feminist in the sense that Lennox takes seriously the question of what women read, why the available literature shapes their self-understanding, and how a woman's intelligence can be simultaneously brilliant (Arabella is sharp and articulate) and catastrophically misdirected by the only models available to her. The novel also, however, concludes with Arabella cured of her delusions and reconciled to a conventional marriage — so whether Lennox is critiquing the romance tradition that misled Arabella, or the wider social system that gave her nothing better to read, is a question the novel leaves productively open. Modern feminist critics including Margaret Anne Doody and Catherine Gallagher have made it a central text in the history of women's reading.
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