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.