Product Description

The Female Quixote (1752), a vivacious and ironical novel parodying the style of Cervantes, portrays the beautiful and aristocratic Arabella, whose passion for reading romances leads her into all manner of misunderstandings. Praised by Fielding, Richardson and Samuel Johnson, the book quickly established Charlotte Lennox as a foremost writer of the Novel of Sentiment. With an excellent introduction and full explanatory notes, this edition will be of particular interest to students of women's literature, and of the eighteenth-century novel.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #461040 in Books
• Published on: 1998-07-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Customer Reviews

See the results of one too-many Mills and Boon...
Arabella is a romantic heroine. Or so she believes. Living in an isolated environment with her father and a large fortune, Arabella is separated from society: her many misunderstandings are born from the alternative reality she gleans from romantic fiction. Lennox's novel is not a romance. Rather, the comedy of Arabella's constant recourse to antiquated and melodramatic heroic values and code of conduct is eventually subverted by the Clergyman who enacts the role of 'male reformer', forcing Arabella to reassess her inflated sense of self-importance in a society where women are not supposed to have 'adventures', and, as the Doctor says to her, 'A long life may be passed without a single occurrence that can cause much surprize, or produce any unexpected consequence of great importance.' An interesting read in terms of how women's roles are perceived in the eighteenth century. Yet despite the fact that this novel was written more than two hundred years ago, the comedy of Arabella's early adventures is still fresh and she represents a remarkable, if comically absurd, woman in a society where females were to be representations of the Passive and Pursued. The ending, in the light of this, is a little disappointing, although the taming of Arabella's wilful independence was necessary for Lennox to get the approval of leading (male) novelists...

Highly Amusing Tale

I found this classic a little hard going, mainly because of its writing style, but stuck with it and am so glad that I did. What follows is a highly amusing tale of one young lady's view on the world. Oh, and apparently, Jane Austen took it as a model for her novel, Northanger Abbey.

The main character, Arabella, is a spoilt and privileged young lady who has been brought up in a secluded castle. To relieve her boredom she reads through her father's library of romances and uses them as a guideline for how to behave in society. Of course, these cause her to have a warped view of how her friends should behave and lead to everyone thinking that she is completely bonkers. Arabella really believes that life is like a romance novel with her as the heroine.

This is a classic that I am so pleased to have finally read. Try it yourself to discover why it has stood the test of time.