The Good Effects of a Whimsical Study: Romance and Women’s Learning in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote
Sharon Smith Palo, University of Illinois
Volume 18, no. 2, Winter 2005-6
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In recent years, studies of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) have focused largely on Lennox’s contribution to the discourse surrounding the development of the novel. These readings usefully explore Lennox’s representation of the complex relationship between the romance and the novel and frequently cite the attempts of novelists such as Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding to assert the superiority of their writing projects by distinguishing them from those of romance writers. Yet such interpretations fail to consider how Lennox appropriates the representation of romance reading perpetuated by these novelists in order to participate in other kinds of discourse, most notably that concerning women’s learning. Janet Todd briefly considers The Female Quixote within the context of female education, but suggests that the text functions as a conduct book encouraging women’s submission to an ideal of womanhood characterized by self-denial and restraint. I will argue that Lennox uses the representation of her romance-reading heroine to critique this ideal and to explore the potential of female education to completely reshape women’s role within society, particularly within the public sphere.
Other ECF articles on quixotism or Charlotte Lennox include:
Philosophy for the Ladies: Feminism, Pedagogy, and Natural Philosophy in Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum
by ANNA K. SAGAL (ECF 28.1, Fall 2015)
Mid-Century English Quixotism and the Defence of the Novel
by BREAN S. HAMMOND (ECF 10.3, April 1998)
Coming to a Bad End: Sentimentalism, Hermeneutics, and The Female Quixote
by WENDY MOTOOKA (ECF 8.2, January 1996)
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