Charlotte Lennox, "The Female Quixote"

Picture a resolute heroine from a seventeenth-century French romance who has been unknowingly teleported to mid-eighteenth-century Britain. Equipped with her worldview fashioned by the beliefs and values of those romances, how would she navigate this unfamiliar world? Would her journey be a seamless progression from one comically ridiculous error to the next? How would she assess the morals and customs of her newfound society, and how would its members perceive her? In The Female Quixote, Charlotte Lennox embarks on this imaginative experiment. Her Cervantean parody fosters a dynamic reading experience, swinging between complicity and detachment. It projects an image of the parodied romances but also of the social world of eighteenth-century Britain. Encouraging readers to contemplate the fluid interplay between fiction and the real, the novel prompts reflection on the disparities between the social norms of both realms. This study takes a multifaceted approach to Lennox’s novel, situating the work in its literary-historical context and examining the narrative features aligning it both with realist novels and romances. Additionally, it analyses key themes and provides summaries of characters and chapters. The study also offers a selection of texts that shed light on the debates accompanying the transition from an older codification of prose fiction to a new contender: the realist novel. The overarching objective is to showcase The Female Quixote's significance in shaping the modern novel's early history.