Introduction

On its publication in 1752, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote was immediately in vogue, and its heroine, Arabella, captivated the imagination of the novel’s first readers. One of the leading ‘Bluestockings’ of the age, the poet Elizabeth Carter,¹ who must have had a copy of The Female Quixote hot off the press, wrote to Catherine Talbot: ‘I have been reading a book which promises some laughing amusement, “The Female Quixote”; the few chapters I read to my mother last night while we were undressing were whimsical enough and not at all low.’ Writing later to the same correspondent, she claims that ‘Arabella, as a little book, is highly diverting, and much in fashion’. Another Bluestocking, Mary Delany, wrote to one of her friends: ‘We have begun the Female Quixote. I like the design, and am glad to get into good company again.’² The author Samuel Richardson, writing to one of his regular female correspondents, observed: ‘The Female Quixote is written by a woman, a favourite of the author of the Rambler [Samuel Johnson]… Do you not think, however her heroine overacts her part, that Arabella is amiable and innocent?’³ This heroine quickly became part of eighteenth-century cultural vocabulary, as a letter from poet and artist Susanna Highmore to Bluestocking poet and essayist Hester Mulso Chapone suggests: ‘I had some very odd adventures since I saw you, not unworthy of a Lady Arabella, which happily I may relate, when we have the pleasure of meeting again, when in return, I shall, questionless, claim your history.’⁴

These comments illustrate something of the novel’s cultural success in 1752–3; they also share an uncanny emphasis on

performance and fashion, themes that are connected with ideas about female authorship and readership. In the case of Highmore, we find a woman reader performing as Arabella, imitating her style for her female correspondent – Arabella is always demanding the ‘history’ of women she encounters, and ‘questionless’ is something of a linguistic fashion statement for her – but in doing so the writer also asserts her interest in and identification with other women, both within the novel itself and beyond its pages. Though the novel was later reprinted in Anna Barbauld’s heterodox collection The British Novelists (1810) – the only novel written by a woman of the seven pre-1755 novels that Barbauld includes – The Female Quixote disappeared from subsequent similar collections, such as Sir Walter Scott’s Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library (1821–4), and from canonical twentieth-century histories of the novel, notably Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957). It has only in the last

two decades been accorded a significant place in the history of the rise of the novel. Revisionist readings of this history have focused especially on issues of gender, that is, the role of women writers and readers in the rise of the novel, and relatedly, on the realist novel’s efforts to distinguish itself from other types of writing such as the romance. In what follows, The Female Quixote’s place in the life and career of Charlotte Lennox is explored, as well as its complex status within the history of the novel genre. Just as Arabella’s earliest readers write about her as though she were a familiar friend and absorb her into their lives, so does the novel itself engage with contemporary debates about realism and romance, history and scandal, absorbing, though not necessarily resolving, conflicting narratives into its plot, characterization and the texture of its prose. Arabella’s persistent identification with other women means that we never lose sight of the way gender is intimately related to the novel’s formal, commercial and ethical concerns.

Charlotte Lennox’s history

Any account of the novel in these terms needs to begin with the history of its author. Charlotte Ramsay was born around 1729, probably in Gibraltar. There has been much debate about her exact date of birth, but there seems no reason not to accept Samuel Richardson’s claim that in 1753 Lennox was ‘hardly twenty-four’.⁵ Between 1738 and 1742, she lived in Albany, New York, where her father was stationed as Captain of an Independent Company of Foot (when she arrived in England she would ‘promote’ him to the rank of colonel, and claim he was the Governor of New York, perhaps in an attempt to increase her chances of success in London society and, later in life, her chances of receiving financial aid from the Royal Literary Fund). She travelled to England shortly after her father’s death in 1742. There is no contemporary biographical information about her mother, nor about the existence of any siblings.⁶ Although she spent only a few years in America, she is sometimes called ‘the first American novelist’ in recognition of the American settings of her first and last novels, The Life of Harriot Stuart (1750) and Euphemia (1790).⁷ In England she found two aristocratic female patrons, Lady Isabella Finch and the Countess of Rockingham, but she was disappointed in the favours she hoped to receive from them.

In 1747, Charlotte Ramsay married Alexander Lennox, a shiftless Scot who worked for the London printer William Strahan. Their apparently unhappy marriage was fraught with financial problems and disagreements about the upbringing of their children, a daughter, Harriot Holles, born in 1765, and a son, George Louis, in 1771. Charlotte received financial assistance from the Duchess of Newcastle in 1760 during a period of illness probably caused by overwork. When she recovered, she worked for a time as a governess. In the later 1760s, she lived in Somerset House, which had the reputation of being a sort of aristocratic almshouse.⁸ From 1773 to 1782, Alexander Lennox worked for the Customs service and the family enjoyed, probably for the first time, the stability of a regular income. Their daughter died around 1783–4 and the Lennoxes probably separated some time in the early 1790s. For a period in 1793, Charlotte Lennox lived with Frances Reynolds, sister of Sir Joshua Reynolds, perhaps as a housekeeper and certainly in conditions of financial hardship, being obliged to support herself and her son on an income of £40 per year (this sum places Lennox on the very margins of gentility and would necessitate an extremely frugal lifestyle).⁹ In the last decade of her life, she made a number of appeals to the Royal Literary Fund for financial aid, and the Fund subsidized her regularly, including 13 guineas in 1793 which enabled Lennox to send her son to America in order to extricate him from some unspecified ‘dreadful circumstances’ in which he was embroiled.¹⁰ She died in penury in Westminster on 4 January 1804.¹¹

Charlotte Lennox began her literary career as a poet, publishing her Poems on Several Occasions. Written by a Young Lady in November 1747, the month after her marriage to Alexander Lennox. This volume included what became her best-known poem, ‘The Art of Coquetry’, which was subsequently republished in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1750). The poem advises young women to practise feminine ‘wiles’ in order to enslave men to ‘their empire’, it reminds them that women’s ‘wit’ must consolidate what their beauty initially gains, and that female ‘liberty’ depends upon them not falling in love themselves. The poems embrace the tradition of the erotic writing associated with the seductive ‘Astrea’ (poet, playwright and novelist Aphra Behn, 1640–89) rather than the modest subjects of the chaste ‘Orinda’ (Welsh poet and dramatist Katherine Philips, 1632–64). Because women writers continued to be judged by the morality of their subjects, Lennox’s reputation was tainted by her perceived allegiance to ‘Astrea’. The Gentleman’s Magazine printed a number of adulatory, and ardent, poetic responses, which praised her ‘melting lays’ and claimed her as the ‘British Sappho’. However, women writers, who would later succumb to the charms of The Female Quixote, took a moral stance against Lennox’s early poems, being ‘scandalized’ at a group reading of ‘The Art of Coquetry’ and preferring ‘an edifying essay proper to be put into the hands of the Muses’.¹² Attempts to republish Poems by subscription¹³ two years after the first edition were unsuccessful.

Lennox’s first novel, The Life of Harriot Stuart, Written by Herself, was published in December 1750, and the reception of this novel, as well as her Poems, provides a useful context for reading The Female Quixote itself. Harriot Stuart is a young orphaned aristocratic girl who travels from America to England in search of a rich aunt, but finds herself unprotected in London. She is an inveterate coquette – claiming her first conquest at the age of eleven – and a poet whose works (which include some of Lennox’s own previously published poems) earn her the title ‘Sappho’. Various members of the aristocracy promise her patronage but then abandon her. She goes on to experience some sensational adventures, including an episode of Indian captivity, a drama at sea during which she stabs a villainous English captain who attempts to rape her, and a kidnapping, after which she is incarcerated in a French convent. She finally marries the man she loves, with a former suitor selflessly assisting at the ceremony.

The novel received mixed reviews. The Gentleman’s Magazine declared it was ‘penn’d with the purity of a Clarissa’, while aristocratic readers like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu were hostile to Lennox’s lightly disguised attack on her former patron Lady Isabella Finch, who appears as the despicable Lady Cecelia.¹⁴ The Magazine of Magazines somewhat eccentrically classed the novel along with John Cleland’s pornographic Fanny Hill (1748–9) as a book likely to debauch young men.¹⁵ The Monthly Review recognized it as the graceful ‘produce of a female pen’ but thought it was not likely to ‘improve the morals of the reader’.¹⁶ Lennox seems to have allowed people to believe that the novel was autobiographical, but this attempt to add some glamour to her history gave substance to speculations about her own sexual reputation.

As a woman writer in the mid eighteenth century, Lennox’s success was crucially dependent on her literary and aristocratic patrons. Samuel Johnson reputedly celebrated the publication of Harriot Stuart with an all-night party at a tavern, complete with an apple pie stuck with bay leaves and a laurel crown for Lennox. He introduced Lennox to the men who would subsequently publish her work, such as John Payne and Andrew Millar, or collaborate with her, like John Boyle, Earl of Cork and of Orrery. He reviewed many of her works favourably, persuaded Edward Cave to promote her work in the Gentleman’s Magazine throughout the 1750s and wrote a number of the dedications to her literary efforts. Johnson also introduced Lennox to Samuel Richardson, who offered criticism on her second novel, The Female Quixote (1752), helped her find a publisher for it, printed the first edition, may have printed her third novel Henrietta (1758) and recommended her to the publisher Roger Dodsley for translation work. Lennox’s friendships with Johnson and Richardson helped her to maintain a reputation as a respectable literary figure but she sometimes had to accept the conservative advice of her more famous mentors over her own literary wishes.

Lennox’s most successful work, The Female Quixote, was published by Millar in March 1752, with a dedication to the Earl of Middlesex written by Johnson. Both Johnson and Richardson had given advice on the novel, and their input is discussed in more detail below. Positive reviews from Johnson in the Gentleman’s Magazine and Henry Fielding in the Covent-Garden Journal promoted The Female Quixote as it entered the literary marketplace. A second edition, corrected by the author, appeared in July 1752, and editions appeared in Dublin in 1752 and 1753. In 1783 it was reproduced in the Novelists Magazine and in 1810 in Barbauld’s British Novelists, which was reprinted in 1820. It was translated into German in 1754, Dutch in 1762, French in 1773 and Spanish in 1808. Although Lennox’s name did not appear on the title page of the novel until 1783, her authorship was generally known, and as noted above, the characters, style and vocabulary of the novel captured the imagination of the reading public.

After the success of The Female Quixote, Lennox continued writing novels, but she also turned her hand to a number of different genres in order to establish herself as a professional writer. She wrote three plays with some success: Philander: A Dramatic Pastoral (1757), The Sister (1769) and Old City

Manners (1775), and she worked with Samuel Johnson and John Boyle to produce Shakespear Illustrated, published in 1753–4, in which she claims that the Bard sometimes ‘mangled and defaced’ his source material, as well as criticizing his representation of women. Between 1755 and 1775, the bulk of her literary work was translation from French, which she seems to have learnt as a child, and Italian, which she acquired for the purposes of translation. Much of this was hack work, and Lennox had no qualms about recycling her work under different titles or using contributions from other writers. She certainly wrote as much out of economic necessity as from any sense of vocation, and we should remember that during this time her husband’s income was erratic, and that she had two young children to support. Her translations also kept Lennox’s name

in the public eye and helped to foster her reputation for literary gentility. However, even her historical translations provoked her admirers to produce semi-voyeuristic poems about her; thus, an anonymous writer, ‘who happened to see her riding on horse back in Windsor Forest in the dress of a country Girl’, sent Lennox a poem in which she appears as the ‘coy’ Clio (the muse of history) disguised in an alluring ‘rustic gown’.¹⁷ Lennox also edited and provided much of the material for the magazine the Lady’s Museum (1760–61), which included her translations and serial publication of one of her novels. The magazine also featured poems as well as essays on history, geography and philosophy for ladies, with topics ranging from the vestal virgins of Rome to the natural history of butterflies, but it had to compete against many similar publications and was discontinued after eleven issues.

What emerges from this brief history of Charlotte Lennox’s life and literary career is a picture of a successful woman writer, savvy about the marketplace, ‘networking’ with skill and genre-crossing with panache. In Richard Samuel’s engraving of 1778 (the basis for a painting exhibited in 1779), she appears as one of ‘The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain’, along with the likes of Anna Barbauld, Angelica Kauffman, Hannah More and Catherine Macaulay.

Romancing the novel: the literary context

The Female Quixote, subtitled ‘The Adventures of Arabella’, focuses on a young heiress whose sheltered life, remote from mainstream society, is dominated by her reading of seventeenth-century French romances. Arabella’s ideas and behaviour are modelled on the heroines she encounters in these romances. Like the deluded hero of Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote (1605/1615) she makes all sorts of mistakes in her reading of the world. In the course of the novel, Arabella supposes a young gardener to be a disguised nobleman with designs upon her when his real object is to steal fish from the estate; she suspects her uncle, the father of her long-suffering suitor Glanville, of an incestuous passion for her; she rushes to rescue a cross-dressed prostitute from her rowdy companions in Vauxhall Gardens, imagining her to be a disguised noblewoman about to be ‘ravished’. Finally, after she suffers a severe illness as a result of jumping into a river to escape imaginary pursuers, a clergyman ‘cures’ Arabella of her dependence on romances, and she marries the faithful suitor who has been waiting for her to come to her senses.

A simple summary would seem to suggest that Lennox’s primary concern was to adapt Cervantes’ ridicule of chivalric romances, substituting heroic romances and exposing their dangers for female readers. But such a reading fails to do justice to Lennox’s self-conscious engagement with the controversies about fiction that took place in mid-eighteenth-century England (as well as oversimplifying Cervantes’ great novel). In order to understand the significance of Lennox’s representation of her heroine, of women writers (including herself) and of other female figures, we need first to understand something of this literary and cultural context. In particular, we first need to ask, why is ‘Lady Bella’s Foible’ (I.VI) ¹⁸ her indulgence in French romances? These books of the early to mid seventeenth century, such as Madeleine de Scudéry’s Artamène, ou le grand Cyrus (1649–53) and Clélie, histoire romaine (1654–60), had been translated into English, like those in Arabella’s collection, during the second half of the seventeenth century. Arabella’s representation

of these romances is quite accurate: in them, ‘Love was the ruling Principle of the World’ (I.I), and the heroes spend years performing heroic deeds to gain the favour of imperious heroines; they were also extremely long, multi-volume products – thus Glanville is understandably dismayed when Arabella’s servant returns from the library, ‘sinking under the Weight’ of only four ‘voluminous Romances’ (I.XII). However, as even Lennox’s earliest critics pointed out, while such romances were read in the eighteenth century, they were not fashionable by 1752.¹⁹ Indeed, even parodies of the French romances were already historically quite distant – de Subligny’s La Fausse Clélie (1670) was translated into English in 1678 with the running title ‘Mock-Clelia, or Madam Quixote’. Henry Fielding’s review of Lennox’s novel argued that ‘the Humour of Romance, which is principally ridiculed in this Work, be not at present greatly in fashion in this Kingdom’.²⁰ Clara Reeve, in 1785, claimed that

the Satire of the Female Quixote seems in great measure to have lost its aim, because at the time it first appeared, the taste for those Romances was extinct, and the books exploded… [T]his book came some thirty or fourty years too late… Romances at this time were quite out of fashion, and the press groaned under the weight of Novels, which sprung up like Mushrooms every year.²¹

It is worth noting that the romances Arabella reads are a legacy from her dead mother, who ‘had purchased these Books to soften a Solitude which she found very disagreeable’ (I.I), and, of course, such romances were and are traditionally associated with women writers and readers. So, from the beginning, Arabella identifies with a female tradition, but one which is apparently disavowed through parody.

For all the emphasis on romance, the ‘naughty novels’ of Aphra Behn, Delarivièr Manley and the early work of Eliza Haywood were more immediate for many readers,²² as were the memoirs of writers like Laetitia Pilkington and Constantia Philips, whose amorous autobiographies scandalized, and

fascinated, readers in the 1740s. Lennox was already identified with Behn’s poetry, and like Manley she seems to have exploited the reading public’s tendency to view women’s texts as autobiographical, including in Harriot Stuart material from her own life. Bestsellers in the amorous intrigue tradition include: Behn’s Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684–7), Manley’s Secret Memoirs and Manners of several Persons of Quality of both Sexes. From the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediterranean (1709) and Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719–20). To the early eighteenth-century reading public, such narratives appeared sexually immoral, exotic or foreign, imitating scandalous chronicles published in France, and they were either notoriously factual or spectacularly fantastic. Behn and Manley used sex as a cover for writing political allegories – The New Atalantis, for example, is Manley’s criticism of the Whigs dominating the court of Queen Anne, and early eighteenth-century readers (like twenty-first century ones) displayed an insatiable interest in the sex lives of the rich and

famous. Haywood turned the novels of amorous intrigue into formulaic fiction, that is, plot-driven fiction with simplified characters, standard motifs and didactic messages. Her fiction celebrates upper-class licentiousness, promotes heterosexuality and always ends by rewarding the good characters and punishing the bad. In the Dedication to Lasselia (1723), Haywood defended the characteristic erotic scenes of her novels by insisting that the explicit representation of vice functions as a practical warning to the unwary reader (though how the heroine’s erotic dreams would fit within this pedagogic project is not clear). As William Warner points out, it was not only the sexy content, but ‘the sheer quantity of Haywood’s production in this period [1720s and 30s], and the unprecedented popularity it enjoys, which helps give the bad name to novels throughout the century’.²³ Unlike romances, scandalous fictions and memoirs are not mentioned by name in The Female Quixote, but as this Introduction will argue, this does not mean that they are absent, and they constitute the second significant literary context for Lennox’s novel.

The third important context for reading The Female Quixote

is the mid-century debate about fiction that polarized around Richardson’s and Fielding’s ‘competing claims to generic novelty’.²⁴ Both men claimed to be the progenitors of ‘a new species of writing’.²⁵ They shaped the terms by which their culture, as well as subsequent literary history, defined the genre of the novel. The ‘new’ novel ‘exhibit[ed] life in its true state’ (in Johnson’s words),²⁶ and its realism was claimed to be morally improving. There were many differences between the work of Richardson and Fielding – Richardson’s focus is on domestic life, serious plots and psychologically realistic and complex characters, while Fielding’s novels feature typical characters, amusing incidents and plots which turn on surprise and coincidence (Fielding even burlesques the domestic morality of Richardson’s Pamela in Shamela and Joseph Andrews). However, despite these differences and the instabilities surrounding definitions of the new genre, the new species of writing was taxonomically distinguished from the excesses of romance–romance was the negative example for the novel, everything that the realist, masculine, morally respectable English novel was not. Lennox acknowledges her debt to both Richardson

and Fielding, and takes part in the literary controversy of her day.²⁷ Like Joseph Andrews, The Female Quixote makes clear its borrowing from Cervantes’ novel, and like Fielding, Lennox has an ironic narrator and playful chapter titles that constantly remind us of the text’s fictionality and materiality (for example, through comments on the ‘shortness’ of a particular chapter). The Female Quixote also contains many allusions to Richardson’s novel Clarissa; in addition to the clergyman’s explicit recommendation at the end of the novel, there are many parallels of plot and character. If Arabella does ‘not remember to have read of any Heroine that voluntarily left her Father’s House, however persecuted she might be’ (I.IX), contemporary readers certainly would have caught the allusion to Clarissa’s flight from paternal oppression into the hands of the rake Lovelace. In leaving her father’s house, Clarissa does something more improbable than any romance heroine, while the romance-fixated Arabella is ‘more irreproachable than even the eighteenth-century paragon of novelistic virtue’.²⁸

Thus, Lennox mocks domestic realism as much as she mocks romances. Indeed, the narrator observes that in examining the heart of the heroine, she ‘follow[s] the Custom of the Romance and Novel-Writers’ (V.I), implicitly eliding the boundaries between the two forms. Even in Richardson’s and Fielding’s early attempts at generic clarification, novels and romances often seem interchangeable: in Tom Jones, Fielding dismisses both ‘foolish Novels’ and ‘monstrous Romances’ and he caricatures Eliza Haywood as ‘Mrs Novel’.²⁹ Lennox draws on what must have been her own wide reading of romance for the novel’s situations and language, and she borrows from the very sources that she is ostensibly criticizing. Despite the praise heaped on Arabella’s unromantic discourse (Glanville ‘was charmed to hear her talk so rationally’, VII.VI), her sensible speeches often depend on her romance reading. The most extended of these is her observations on raillery, drawn from de Scudéry’s Artamenes, and critic Margaret Dalziel has speculated that the original versions of Arabella’s disquisitions on glory, indifference and suicide may be found in romances.³⁰ Within the novel itself, Sir George comments on the recycling of romance plots and

characters in new novels, and it could certainly be argued that the decision of Arabella’s father to live in a remote castle, far from the intrigues of political life, constitutes a movement from realism to romance (or, from real life to a fantasy of power that has similarities to Arabella’s own empowering fantasies). Thus, The Female Quixote incorporates romance in a way that undercuts claims for the new realist genre’s ‘novelty’ and cultural purity. The Spanish critic José Ortega y Gasset offers a useful way of thinking about this generic mingling (interestingly, his narrative theories devolved from his reading of Don Quixote); he writes that, although ‘the realistic novel was born in opposition to the so-called novel of fantasy, it carries adventure enclosed within its body’ and thus ‘it is not only that [Don] Quixote was written against the books of chivalry, and as a result bears them within it, but that the novel as a literary genre consists essentially of such an absorption.’³¹ It is worth noting that in his review of The Female Quixote, Fielding praises its realism (according to him, it was more probable that romances

would have a subversive effect on a young woman than on an elderly gentleman).³² As discussed below, Lennox plays with different levels of representation (drawn from romance, the realist novel, scandal and contemporary history) and offers her readers different perspectives from which to view Arabella’s actions.

In spite of the satire against Arabella, and the romances with which she is identified, she is undoubtedly a heroine, whom we are meant to admire and with whom we are encouraged to empathize. If romantic heroines were unbelievably beautiful, then so is Arabella. Everyone who meets her is impressed by her looks; even her prosaic uncle Sir Charles is ‘struck with an extreme Surprize at her Beauty’ (II.III), while an unknown gentleman, whom she accosts during her flight from the gardener, is ‘astonished’ at her ‘Beauty… Her Stature; her Shape, her inimitable Complexion; the Lustre of her fine Eyes, and the thousand Charms that adorned her whole Person’ (II.XI).

Arabella laments that her beauty, like that of her favourite romance heroines, ‘has produced very deplorable Effects’ (IV.IX); while she imagines such things as the death of her lovers and the disintegration of family ties, her ‘Charms’ do in fact have tangible effects. The unknown gentleman is, at least momentarily, deprived of speech, while the assembly at Bath, prepared to ridicule her, ‘found themselves aw’d to Respect by that irresistable Charm in the Person of Arabella, which commanded Reverence and Love from all who beheld her’. The narrator continues, ‘Her noble Air, the native Dignity in her Looks, the inexpressible Grace which accompany’d all her Motions, and the consummate Loveliness of her Form, drew the Admiration of the whole Assembly’ (VII.VII). It is impossible to read Arabella purely as a mock-heroine, however much we are invited to laugh at her ‘foible’ of imagining herself as a romance heroine and constructing, or misreading, the world around her to suit this fantasy. She frequently comes off best in her forays into the fashionable world. At Bath, she unintentionally deceives the pedantic Mr Selvin, whose affectation of historical knowledge is demolished by Arabella’s confident disquisition on ancient Greece derived from her reading of historical

romances. When Mr Tinsel indulges in malicious gossip instead of recounting the type of histories that Arabella hoped would ‘improve and delight me… excite my Admiration, engage my Esteem, or influence my Practice’, she speaks out against the practice of satire in Johnsonian-inspired language (VII.VIII).³³

While the text appears to mock the absurdity of romances, it also attempts to rescue or regenerate certain aspects of the genre, notably the ethical values of romance, which include not only romantic heroism but also the more down-to-earth and life-enhancing values of generosity, fidelity, compassion, disinterestedness and sympathy of imagination.³⁴ Arabella’s combination of learning and sensibility is in marked contrast to the self-interest that motivates most of the characters in the novel. Arabella’s frivolous and petty cousin Charlotte often serves as a foil that reveals Arabella’s moral superiority. If Arabella uses the language of power and command shared by the romance heroine and the coquette (she ‘commands’ sick would-be lovers to get well and ‘banishes’ those who infringe upon her notions of propriety), it is Charlotte who displays the feminine wiles

of the inveterate coquette. Charlotte spends a good deal of time perfecting her image, and practising her repertoire of smiles, blushes and sighs. She is dismayed at the negligence of Arabella’s toilette, not least because it confirms her cousin’s beauty as natural not contrived. Her relationship to Arabella, and other women, is competitive: she thinks that the attention Arabella receives, especially from Sir George, diminishes what is due to her; hoping that Arabella ‘would be chagrined to see her [Charlotte] looking so well’, she mistrusts Arabella’s lavish compliments on her beauty, not thinking ‘it possible, one Woman could praise another with any Sincerity’ (II.IX). In the encounters between them, the reader is often first encouraged to find Arabella ridiculous but then prompted to revise this opinion as she displays her superior intelligence and generosity. For example, when Arabella maintains that Miss Groves’s writing master was really a nobleman in disguise, Charlotte laughs: ‘you may as well persuade me, the Moon is made of a Cream Cheese’. Arabella then launches into a pedantic discussion of ‘the second glorious Luminary of the Heavens’, taking literally

Charlotte’s use of a traditional figure of speech. But we are soon taken aback by the astronomically challenged Charlotte who refuses to countenance ‘such whimsical Notions’ as that the ‘same Moon, which don’t appear broader than your Gardener’s Face, is not much less than the whole World’ (IV.I). Arabella changes the subject rather than continue to expose Charlotte’s ignorance.

The two women have very different notions about female propriety, and again the target of the satire shifts from Arabella to Charlotte. Taking her romance heroines as models for her own behaviour, Arabella risks transgressing mid-eighteenth-century codes of conduct, as when, following the example of ‘the fair Amalazontha’ who condescended to visit a rejected lover who was ‘dying for Love of her’, she plans to visit the supposedly suicidal ‘unhappy Bellmour’ (Sir George) in his bedchamber and she defends her position against Charlotte’s criticism of such social indiscretion. However, Charlotte’s view of the world turns out to be more limited than Arabella’s romantic vision, for she casually dismisses ‘Foreigners’ as potential of models of conduct.³⁵ Moreover, while Charlotte rejects Arabella’s charge that she grants ‘criminal Favours’ to her male companions, she does admit to granting kisses, thus exposing the liberties that modish manners would sanction (V.I). The most damning indictment of Charlotte is that she epitomizes Arabella’s disappointment with self-interested female society: instead of romance heroines, Arabella ‘found only Miss Glanville’s among all she knew’ (IX.III). According to Arabella, the thoughtless women who spend their days dressing, dancing and wandering the walks at Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens can have no time for ‘high and noble Adventures’ while the men are emasculated by their participation in fashionable amusements (VII.IX). In contrast to the anti-romantic tenor of ‘real life’, Arabella’s books and solitude seem even more appealing.

‘Singularity of Dress’: the ethics of romance fashions

Throughout the novel, much attention is given to Arabella’s idiosyncratic way of dressing. Lennox uses Arabella’s attachment to the fashions of antiquity as a technique of character revelation, and also as a means of criticizing the excesses of contemporary female fashion and the way in which dress marked class and social status, even signifying moral respectability. It is notable that Arabella’s desire to emulate the heroines of her favourite romances results in outfits that are striking in their simplicity, in sharp contrast to the styles of the emerging bourgeoisie, which encouraged women to encase themselves in steel or bone stays and wear enormous hooped skirts. There was much contemporary commentary on the epic proportions of female dress, especially hoops so wide that two ladies could barely pass each other in a room without raising their petticoats immodestly, and which impeded their access to carriages; one satirical poem descants on ‘monstrous petticoats, bouncing hoop’d petticoats’ and refers to ‘towers of powdered hair’.³⁶ By 1754, a writer for the Connoisseur could claim that ‘The hoop has lost much of its credit with the female world, and has suffered greatly from the introduction of sacks and negligees. Men will agree that next to no clothing, there is nothing more ravishing than an easy dishabille. Our ladies, for that reason perhaps, come into public places as though they were just out of bed.’³⁷ These comments expose the absurdity of mid-century fashion, as well as the way women were seen as sexual objects who deliberately dress to attract men.

Arabella seems uninterested in attracting the male gaze, and is oblivious to the conspicuous consumption that dominated English society of the period. In Book VII, Chapter VII, Arabella wants a robe like that of Princess Julia (a character in Gauthier de Costes de la Calprenède’s Cleopatra (Cléopâtre; 1674)) to wear to a public ball in Bath. The modish Mantua-maker who is ordered to construct the gown, lacking Arabella’s repertoire of historical romance, claims that ‘that Taste was quite out’. When she realizes that Arabella is speaking of a 2000-year-old fashion, the dressmaker exclaims, ‘Lord help us Trades-people, if they did not alter a thousand Times in as many Days! I thought your Ladyship was speaking of the last Month’s Taste; which, as I said before, is quite out now.’ The dress, which is ultimately made by one of Arabella’s own female servants, has ‘no Hoop, and the Blue and Silver Stuff of her Robe, was only kept by its own Richness, from hanging close about her. It… descended in a sweeping Train on the Ground’; the headdress consists of only ‘Jewels and Ribbons… dispos’d to the greatest Advantage’. On the one hand, we are invited to be amused by Arabella here (and Lennox may be indulging in a literary joke, for there is no description of Princess Julia’s dress in Cleopatra that could form a pattern for Arabella’s gown); on the other hand, once again the satire against her is deflected – Arabella’s ‘Singularity of Dress’, which Miss Glanville had assumed would occasion ridicule, turns out to be ‘singularly becoming’: ‘A respectful Silence succeeded [the whispers that first greet Arabella], and the Astonishment her Beauty occasion’d, left them no Room to descant on the Absurdity of her Dress’ (VII.VII).

More is going on with Arabella’s singular dressing than meets the eye. Apart from the obvious satire directed against contemporary fashion victims, Arabella’s dress places its wearer within a network of historical and cultural references, especially in its allusion to the era of classical antiquity that was valorized by eighteenth-century historians, philosophers and literary critics. Arabella’s costume also connects her – symbolically and emotionally – to the Princess Julia, and her dressing-up is thus an act of historical solidarity. Arabella offers a defiant rebuttal of Mr Selvin’s description of Julia as ‘the most abandon’d Prostitute in Rome’ (VII.VII); she defends Julia’s ‘chaste’ character on the basis of romance ‘Anecdotes’, thereby undermining ‘the known Facts in History’ and the truth claims of history writing in general (VII.VIII). Earlier, she had cleared up ‘Mistakes’ about the poet Sappho:

But for Scudery [the romance writer], we had still thought the inimitable Poetess Sappho to be a loose Wanton, whose Verses breathed nothing but unchaste and irregular Fires: On the contrary, she was so remarkably chaste, that she would never even consent to marry. (II.III)

In re-imagining Sappho’s reputation, Arabella might also be seen to vindicate Lennox herself (‘the British Sappho’) and implicitly to defend the heroine of Lennox’s first novel, Harriot Stuart, whose Sapphic poems incite abduction and the threat of seduction. Arabella offers the type of ‘protection and regard’ that Jane Austen, in her famous defence of the novel genre in Northanger Abbey,³⁸ thinks ‘the heroine of one novel’ might expect from ‘the heroine of another’; like Austen, Lennox links women writers, women readers and female characters, implying that these groups should not desert each other. In addition, Lennox may also be gesturing to alternative relationships between women, for Sappho’s resistance to marriage has been seen in terms of her attraction to women.

Even when not actually dressing up in full historical costume, Arabella still incorporates some elements of historical fashion in her outfits. She is especially fond of veils, in defiance of contemporary fashion conventions. Before entering the Pump Room at Bath, for example, she pulls the black gauze veil in which she is swathed ‘quite over her Face, following therein the Custom of the Ladies in Clelia, and Artamenes, who, in mixed Companies, always hid their Faces with great Care’. Arabella’s veil creates ‘great Disturbance’ among the spectators (VII.IV), not least because they cannot immediately define its meaning or settle upon the identity it conceals:

Some of the wiser Sort took her for a Foreigner; others, of still more Sagacity, supposed her a Scots Lady, covered with her Plaid; and a third Sort, infinitely wiser than either, concluded she was a Spanish Nun, that had escaped from a Convent, and had not yet quitted her Veil. (VII.IV)

Arabella’s self-representation challenges labels of nationality (is she Scottish? Spanish? Or simply foreign). During this period, the veil also had imperial connotations, evoking orientalist fantasies of the exotic ‘other’ woman of the East.³⁹ Even Arabella’s

gender identity is metaphorically ‘veiled’ in the novel so that it becomes something mobile and hybrid. Arabella has all the attributes of the new ultra-feminine heroine of sensibility (she faints readily and is fashionably fatigued by a short walk), but she also imitates the ‘Amazonian’ Thalestris, whom Miss Glanville dismisses as ‘a very masculine Sort of Creature’ (III.VI); she is thoroughly immersed in retelling the tales of women in command – of men and of armies; Sir Charles speculates that ‘if she had been a Man, she would have made a great

Figure in Parliament, and… her Speeches might have come perhaps to be printed in time’ (VIII.II), and, of course, she draws constantly on the work of de Scudéry, the romance author who published disguised as a male writer and to whom Arabella attaches a masculine pronoun. Arabella’s dressing-up and her identification with and defence of romance heroines functions within the novel as a mode of empowerment and self-fashioning – Arabella may make all sorts of mistakes in her reading of the world, but her investment in romances also prevents other characters, as well as the reader, from making straightforward judgements about her, as we see quite literally in the episodes when her veiling generates speculation about her identity. Of course, Arabella cannot completely control the ways in which she is ‘read’ by others – ironically, though she veils herself when she seems to be attracting too much attention (for example, when she goes to church in Book I, Chapter II), the veil itself makes her an object of curiosity and erotic speculation.

‘Put yourself into my Protection, and acquaint me with the History of your Misfortunes’: Arabella and other women

Arabella’s fondness for romance heroines and historical figures finds an analogue in her empathetic relations with a number of women in the novel. On one level, Arabella’s understanding of the likes of Miss Groves (whom she encounters at church early in the novel), the prostitute in Vauxhall Gardens and the actress/ Princess of Gaul in Richmond Park is part of her fantasy world,

and the novel appeals to readers to read it with a realist perspective and thus to smile at Arabella’s misperceptions. But on another level, Arabella’s romantic misreadings offer alternative histories of these women which raise important ethical questions about the representation and naming of socially marginalized figures. Arabella immediately sees the magnificently dressed and physically alluring Miss Groves as the reincarnation of ‘the beautiful Candace’, and she observes ‘a great Appearance of Melancholy in her Eyes’. She interprets Miss Groves’s silence as the product of suffering, but the novel’s ironic narrator explains that the latter’s fashionable but superficial manners disqualify her from Arabella’s refined conversation. In classic romance fashion, Arabella turns to Miss Groves’s waiting woman, Mrs Morris, for the ‘History’ of ‘the fair Stranger’ and she is reduced to tears by the ensuing narrative of illicit sexuality and illegitimate children (II.IV). Mrs Morris gets nothing for her betrayal of her mistress’s ‘Secrets’, for Arabella ‘seemed so little sensible of the Pleasure of Scandal,

as to be wholly ignorant of its Nature; and not to know when it was told her’ (II.VI); as the narrator’s sly observation makes clear, contemporary readers would certainly have recognized scandal when it was told them. The references to the Court of King George II, including Lennox’s derogatory allusion to the King’s fat German mistresses, his attentions to Miss Groves and Miss Groves’s affair with an earl’s brother, are the very stuff of scandal fiction and memoirs, and indeed provoked Lennox’s publisher Andrew Millar to ask for alterations; she writes to Richardson that ‘he assures me that the History of Miss Groves / in the first Vol. will not be printed’.⁴⁰ Arabella, however, finds precedents in romance for what she interprets as character defamation, and in doing so prompts us to rethink familiar trajectories of the fallen woman. Miss Groves, after apparent dalliances with a sportsman and her writing master, is abandoned by her dysfunctional family to fend for herself in London, where she is ‘ruined’ by the rakish Mr L—. During her second pregnancy she is abandoned by him, and she subsequently contracts a secret marriage with a country gentleman. Miss Groves may not be an especially appealing character, but

Arabella’s sympathy is so contagious that the reader becomes less critical of Miss Groves’s offences against propriety and more critical of the cultural and legal institutions that collude with Mr L—’s abduction of Miss Groves’s daughter and his refusal to tell her what he has done with the child.

Towards the end of the novel, Arabella meets a tearful creature who recounts the history of her abandonment by someone called Ariamenes, who turns out to be Glanville; it transpires that this young woman, ‘Cynecia’, is an actress bribed and coached by Sir George to impersonate a Princess forsaken by Glanville as part of his plot to separate the cousins. Arabella is imposed upon, and we laugh at her credulity, but once again, her ‘foible’ is precisely what allows her to have the adventure of meeting someone with whom she would not otherwise have been able to associate. Moreover, though Arabella’s discovery of Glanville’s apparent infidelity provokes an ‘Extacy of Grief’ (clearly she is in love with him), she refuses to triumph over her new-found friend, thus putting her loyalty to the ‘other woman’ above her attachment to a man (IX.V).

The most dramatic and culturally significant encounter between Arabella and another woman takes places at Vauxhall Gardens, where Arabella tries to console an intoxicated, cross-dressed prostitute after a young man, ‘pretending to be affronted at something she said, drew his Sword upon the disguis’d Fair One’ (IX.I). It is important to note that prostitution was not a remote or abstract issue for writers in mid-century London; indeed, Lennox’s mentors Johnson and Richardson were publicly involved in prostitution reform, while Johnson’s friend and biographer, James Boswell, famously recorded his more intimate encounters with prostitutes.⁴¹ In order to provide a context for Lennox’s representation of prostitution (and of related modes of female sexuality), it is necessary first to sketch the two dominant models of the eighteenth-century prostitute. The first version has its roots in libertine and pornographic literature and anti-female satire; the prostitute is seen as monstrous, sexually voracious and often diseased, using her treacherous arts to entice men and to recruit other women into the ranks of prostitution. Prostitution is often depicted as criminal

as well as scandalous, and much attention is given to transgressive sexual practices (such as bestiality or sodomy). Memorable examples include the prostitute in Robert Gould’s satirical poem Love Given O’re (1682) who beguiles women into prostitution when her own body has become ‘one putrid Sore’, and Richardson’s monstrous brothel-keeper Madam Sinclair and the unruly harlots over whom she presides in Clarissa. Ideas about wanton women also extended to certain types of women’s writing as the product of ‘a wanton Muse’: John Duncombe’s 1754 poem The Feminiad indites ‘the bold unblushing mien’ of writers such as Manley and Behn, as well as scandalous memoirists like Pilkington.⁴² Social concerns about the moral effects of fiction also focused on the figure of the prostitute: after exempting Richardson’s productions from his critique, James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1766) railed against the impropriety of the mass of novels that ‘are in their nature so shameful, in their tendency so pestiferous, and contain such rank treason against the royalty of Virtue, such horrible violation of all decorum, that she who can bear to peruse them must be in her soul a prostitute, let her reputation in life be what it will’.⁴³ Here, female readers are warned to stay within the boundaries of generic propriety if they do not wish to be tarnished by association with prostitution.

The other dominant view of prostitution recasts the women as victims – they are represented as sentimental, tearfully repentant subjects worthy of relief. In ‘The History of Misella debauched by her Relation’ (1750–52), Johnson portrays ‘a band of these miserable females, covered with rags, shivering with cold, and pining with hunger’.⁴⁴ Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison advocates ‘An Hospital for Female Penitents’, for those innocent victims of male perfidy, ‘who are eminently entitled to our pity’,⁴⁵ a plan that came to fruition with the opening of the Magdalen House for Penitent Prostitutes in 1758. The Reverend William Dodd’s sermons preached at the Magdalen Hospital rejected the stereotype of the ‘pestilent Prostitute’, instead urging compassion for such ‘ruined’ women, and especially for anguished maternal figures.⁴⁶ The Magdalen Hospital’s Sunday services became a popular attraction, open to the public by ticket and patronized by fashionable bourgeois society. These occasions were famous for theatrical scenes of sentimental suffering displayed by the penitent prostitutes. Richardson encouraged Millar and Robert Dodsley to publish (and was himself the printer of) Lady Barbara Montagu’s novel-length collection of Magdalen biographies entitled The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House (1760); these narratives of women seduced into prostitution helped to transform society’s view of the prostitute into a suffering individual who could be resocialized.

If we return to Lennox’s scene of prostitution, we can see that she engages with these representations but she also reconfigures them. The transvestite mistress reminds Arabella of ‘the beautiful Aspasia’ and ‘the beautiful Candace’ (IX.I); for the reader, the prostitute recapitulates all the cross-historical dressing and rhetorical cross-dressing that punctuates the novel. In the almost obligatory confrontation between the innocent and the fallen woman in eighteenth-century novels, the innocent woman is usually terrified that people will identify her with the fallen one, as in the heroine’s anxious encounter with the whores in Marylebone Gardens in Frances Burney’s Evelina; in that episode, the two prostitutes are characterized by their boldness and callousness towards Evelina, while Evelina experiences only ‘humiliating’ ‘mortifications’ from their proximity.

Like Arabella, Evelina also goes to Vauxhall Gardens, where she is accosted by a party of men in the ‘dark walks’, whereupon the distraught Evelina exclaims, ‘ “I am no actress.” ’⁴⁷ The unruly prostitute in The Female Quixote conjures up the ghost of the racy sexual narratives of Behn, Manley and Haywood, precisely the literary heritage that was least acceptable for a mid-century woman writer with aspirations of respectability. When an audience gathers to enjoy the spectacle of her mock-lover kneeling at her feet and addressing her in mock-heroic verse, the prostitute is recognizable as an example of what Duncombe would call ‘the wanton Muse’. But Lennox’s representation also invokes contemporary reformist literature that casts prostitutes as victims and prefigures the ways in which the Magdalen narratives humanize and individualize the prostitute.

The young woman’s face is pale with terror and woe, she is drawn to Arabella and though she finds the other woman’s words strange, she responds to their ‘affecting Earnestness’ and thanks her in a quiet and dignified way. Arabella wants to hear the prostitute’s story, ‘the History of your Misfortunes’, as a prelude to helping her ‘re-establish the Repose’ of her life. We never learn if the prostitute would have become a reformed character under the protection of Arabella, for the naval officer, with whom she came to the gardens, wakes up from his alcoholic daze and brandishes his sword; Arabella gets Miss Glanville away from the scene, leaving Mr Glanville ‘to take Care of the distress’d Lady’, a command he ignores. Of course, Arabella does not even recognize the prostitute as a prostitute – culturally recognized sexual identities do not register with her, and in terms of the novel’s anti-romance vision, this is simply comic. But this realist interpretation is qualified by the

spectacle of these two women, holding hands in front of a crowd of spectators and sharing a predilection for exotic costuming. Mr Glanville is driven ‘almost mad with Vexation’ at the spectacle Arabella makes of herself: ‘Are you mad, Madam, said he in a Whisper, to make all this Rout about a Prostitute? Do you see how every Body stares at you? What will they think’ (IX.I). Arabella does not ‘expose’ herself so much as Glanville’s hysteria reveals his own fears and prejudices. Arabella’s fantasy has a significant ethical purpose; her sympathetic intimacy with the prostitute challenges the rigid separation of virtuous and vicious women that prevailed in conduct books and novels, and offers readers a vision of social coherence beyond such polarized distinctions.

Arabella’s investment in romances is an escape from reality, but also a comment on it. While she believes in romances, and models her behaviour on romance heroines, she is empowered to have adventures, to meet women who inhabit the sexual shadowlands of mid-eighteenth-century English society and to fashion both them and herself in unconventional ways. These encounters also show how Arabella moves seamlessly between the past and the present, the fantastic and the plausible, the

real and the imagined, as does Lennox herself in shaping the narrative. The Female Quixote alludes to the heroines of ancient history and seventeenth-century French romances; it features characters that are recognizably novelistic (Charlotte Glanville) and those that seem to have migrated from scandal narratives (Miss Groves), as well as refugees from the literature of prostitution. There are also references to real contemporary figures, notably a brief but revealing discussion of Lennox’s contemporaries, Maria and Elizabeth Gunning.⁴⁸ This is a key episode in understanding how Arabella’s – and Lennox’s – investment in historical fiction is also a concern with the relation between fiction and history and with the way society privileges certain representations of ‘reality’ over others. The question at issue here is, who has the authority to legitimate representation? The Gunning girls came over from Ireland with their family in 1750, and their good looks and Irish charms made them

celebrated figures. In 1752, Elizabeth married the Duke of Hamilton and Maria the Earl of Coventry.⁴⁹ They appear in the novel in a discussion between Glanville and Sir George about ‘the Two celebrated Beauties’ (in the first edition more explicitly described as ‘the Two Sister Beauties’), who are attended by a ‘Crowd of Beaux… to all Places of polite Diversion in Town’. Glanville pities the men enslaved by these women, for they must ignore the great actor Garrick in order to gaze on the sisters’ charms and listen to their trifling conversation. Glanville and Sir George reveal the fear that men are disabled in their subjugation to beauty which compromises masculine rationality and self-possession. As we might expect, Arabella interrupts their conversation to defend these ‘Town Beauties’,⁵⁰ and once again she appeals to her repertoire of romance ‘Beauties’ and heroes for genealogical precedents that support her interpretation (IV.III).

There are significant links between Arabella and the Gunnings. Maria Gunning, in particular, seems to have liked to defy fashion conventions. Thus, Mary Delany (whom, we should recall, was reading The Female Quixote in April 1752, and writing to her friends about it) wrote to a correspondent about Maria:

Yesterday after chapel the Duchess brought home Lady Coventry to feast me, and a feast she was! She is a fine figure and vastly handsome… she has a thousand airs, but with a sort of innocence that diverts one! Her dress was a black silk sack, made for a large hoop, which she wore without any, and it trailed a yard on the ground.⁵¹

Even her shoes could draw a crowd, with one shoemaker capitalizing on this fetishistic desire by charging a penny for a sight of the shoes he was making for Maria Gunning. The greatest similarity between the three women is in terms of the ‘noise’ they generate: Arabella is certain that she must make a great ‘Noise and Bustle’ in the world in order to rule within the Empire of Love (III.VI), and contemporary commentary on the Gunnings emphasizes the ‘noise’ (Walpole’s word) that marked their conquest of the fashionable world.⁵² Like the other women with whom Arabella empathizes, the sisters’ public visibility placed them in close proximity, at least figuratively, to other ‘public’ women, such as prostitutes and actresses, and they actually considered joining the morally dubious acting profession, which again links the Gunnings both with the actress Arabella encounters and with Lennox herself, who worked as an actress, though a ‘deplorable’ one, according to Horace Walpole.

Arabella speaks up for the Gunnings, in her defence of the maligned beauties, and she identifies with them. In the midst of competing views of the Gunnings, which mostly judged them as guilty of inciting folly in their admirers, Lennox lends her support to the atypical account purveyed in a famous poem about Elizabeth and Maria Gunning, The Charms of Beauty, which casts their beauty as the transparent clothing for their chastity and sees their admirers ‘chastiz’d’ into respect.⁵³ In defending, befriending and even identifying with actresses, prostitutes and the Gunning sisters, Arabella contests dominant views about female publicity. To this list, we might add the female author herself, whose public identity frames the novel’s ideological position: thus, Lennox implicitly chastizes those readers who had read ‘The Art of Coquetry’ and Harriot Stuart as adverts for her own sexual availability. Arabella’s noisy, theatrical, cross-class and cross-historical acts of empathy startle the more conventional characters in the novel, but they must also have startled conventional realist readers, who may have become increasingly uncertain of their value judgements about genres as well as about gender.

Arabella’s cures: ‘my Heart yields to the Force of Truth’

Arabella’s identification with a series of culturally suspect female figures and her social imagination depend on her investment in reading romance as historical reality, a true account of events that really happened. How then are we to read the ending of the novel in which Arabella is ‘cured’ of her romantic delusions? Near the end of The Female Quixote, Arabella develops a dangerous fever after she has thrown herself into the Thames to escape imaginary ravishers, thus preserving her ‘immortal Glory’ (IX.IX). Thinking she is going to die, Arabella requests the assistance of ‘some worthy Divine’ to help her prepare for death. While Arabella’s ‘delicate Constitution’ slowly recovers, the Divine is more concerned with the health of her mind which he laments has been ruined by her ‘ridiculous Study’ of romances (IX.X).

In fact, it is worth noting that Arabella encounters two figures who offer revisionary and contrasting accounts of romance and templates for her own behaviour: the penultimate Book of Volume II introduces a divine countess and the final Book introduces the sententious divine. We first meet the countess at an assembly in Bath, when she rescues the absent Arabella from ‘the ill-natur’d Raillery of her Sex’, repeating as she does so Arabella’s defence of maligned women throughout the novel. The ladies’ jealousy of Arabella’s beauty manifests itself as sarcasm and ‘contemptuous Jests’, fuelled by Miss Glanville’s disclosure of Arabella’s obsession for romance reading and the ‘Extravagancies’ it had led her into. Part of the countess’s defence of Arabella against her defamers is that though herself a model of wit, learning and sensibility, she had also ‘when very young, been deep read in Romances’, as her

subsequent detailed literary conversations with Arabella indicate (VIII.V). If the countess’s compassion is grounded in their shared history of romance reading, her cure does not reject romance but rather insists on its proper historical context.⁵⁴ She argues that romance is culturally and historically specific, that is, that though the romance values of ‘Glory, Virtue, Courage, Generosity, and Honour’ endure, the way in which these ideals are expressed varies according to different historical moments and geographical locations. For example, Oroondates, that touchstone of romantic virtue, would be judged ‘impious and base’ according to contemporary Christian doctrine; likewise, if feminine merit was established in ancient times through multiple abductions, ‘a Beauty in this [age] could not pass thro’ the Hands of several different Ravishers, without bringing an Imputation on her Chastity’ (VIII.VII). The problem then is not with romance per se, which clearly does help to create generous and virtuous subjects like Arabella herself, but with an unhistoricized reading of romance that leads to the delusion that mid-eighteenth-century English society is governed according to romance conventions.

The countess is whisked away suddenly to care for her sick mother before her therapeutic conversations can take effect. But if Arabella had followed the countess’s instructions to put romance behind her in order to find a legitimate role for herself within the reality of her social context, we should ask, what would her autobiography look like? The countess’s attenuated description of ‘all the material Passages of my Life’ (birth, education, happy parentally condoned marriage) suggests that the ideal virtuous female subject has no story to tell because any story about a woman inevitably becomes a sexual history: ‘the History of a Woman of Honour’ does not figure within history itself (VIII.VII). Her view of femininity is so extreme as to seem almost parodic. The countess equates female virtue with non-narratable female subjectivity, in other words, in accordance with conservative domestic ideology, the virtuous woman leads a profoundly uneventful life that differs very little from that of other sensible women of the same rank. All this contrasts oddly with Arabella’s ‘adventures’ which enable her to meet people outside her social class and to bypass the conventions of female propriety, without compromising her virtue. The novel in which Arabella appears, which so delighted eighteenth-century readers, would itself not have been possible if Arabella’s life resembled that of the countess.

After the countess disappears from the narrative, the ‘Pious and Learned Doctor’ takes over Arabella’s cure following her potentially fatal dip in the Thames (IX.X). For many years critics suspected that Johnson wrote all or part of the text’s penultimate chapter (which features the clergyman’s sententious disquisitions on reason and reading, and which literally quotes Johnson’s well-known praise of Richardson⁵⁵), but the chapter may simply be Lennox’s laudatory mimicry of Johnson, her strategic imitation of a male voice (alternatively, we might think of Johnson performing as a female author, as he did in the Dedication). Richardson seems to have encouraged the novel’s hasty conclusion, advising Lennox that two volumes would do more for her future reputation than three (odd advice perhaps from the author of the longest novel in English). In an

earlier draft, Lennox had intended that Clarissa play a more pivotal role in Arabella’s cure but was discouraged by Richardson himself. As critics have pointed out, though Arabella must relinquish her romances, she does not have to relinquish fiction in favour of real life – rather, she must reject romances and embrace novel reading.⁵⁶ According to the clergyman, ‘Truth is not always injured by Fiction’ – what matters is that the fiction is realistic and ethical: ‘Books ought to supply an Antidote’ to the wickedness of real life. In his formulation, Clarissa ‘convey[s] the most solid Instructions, the noblest Sentiments, and the most exalted Piety, in the pleasing Dress of a Novel’ (IX.XI). But the clergyman’s recommendation of truthful, didactic fictions recapitulates Arabella’s persistent description of her romances as historical documents that encourage their readers to emulate the virtuous and heroic behaviour they represent. This similarity underlines the tendency for the novel and the romance to be confused throughout The Female Quixote.

What remains most troubling about the clergyman’s cure is its rejection of romances as ‘senseless Fictions’ full of ‘philosophical Absurdities’. According to him, romances can only teach ‘the Arts of Intrigue’, and he claims that

It is impossible to read these Tales without lessening part of that Humility, which by preserving in us a Sense of our Alliance with all Human Nature, keeps us awake to Tenderness and Sympathy, or without impairing that Compassion which is implanted in us as an Incentive to Acts of Kindness. (IX.XI)

As we have seen, the character most alive to tenderness, sympathy and compassion is the inveterate romance reader Arabella; like Arabella, the Countess seems uninjured by her dangerous reading, being a model of ‘Candour… Sweetness… Modesty and Benevolence’ (VIII.V). Ungenerous behaviour proliferates among the novel’s non-romance-reading characters, such as Selvin, Tinsel and Hervey, while Charlotte Glanville seems to have learnt the arts of intrigue without the help of romances.

Many readers think that Arabella and the novel itself come to a bad end: the novel is concluded abruptly and Arabella dwindles into a wife. The feisty heroine, whose retreat from reality was a form of empowerment and self-fashioning, ends up with a consciousness of her own imperfections, seemingly ready to take up a conventional role in the private sphere and relinquish all her pretensions to public life. Barbauld was one of the first critics to find the novel ‘not very well wound up’.⁵⁷ And yet the narrator offers the possibility of an ironic reading of the conservative conclusion – indeed, the penultimate chapter’s title, ‘Being in the Author’s Opinion, the best Chapter in this History’, implicitly acknowledges alternative opinions. Kate Levin argues that the ending had commercial implications for Lennox herself; it was a marketing strategy that confirmed her work as acceptable female reading matter and salvaged the reputation that was tainted by her poems and by Harriot Stuart. The Divine’s ‘cure’ of Arabella’s mind prefigures Lennox’s post-Quixote ‘proper’ novels.⁵⁸ It is worth returning here to the fact that there are two cures for Arabella’s addiction to romance, and thinking about the meaning of this double solution. As

critics have suggested, Arabella is asked to historicize or to reject romance, and ultimately to embrace the novel. But these options screen the novel’s scandalous history; especially, they occlude the relationship of mid-eighteenth-century female-authored fiction to its sexy predecessors. By the time she wrote Henrietta, Lennox seemed to have put these alternative histories behind her in a canny decision to promote her own and her novel’s public respectability: Henrietta throws away Manley’s ‘secret memoirs’, The New Atalantis, and rejects her landlady-cum-madam’s recommendation of Haywood’s novels, preferring to reread Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. This preference for the new form of the (masculine) novel functions to ratify the

heroine’s virtue. But scandal narratives abound in The Female Quixote. Each time Arabella demands a lady’s ‘history’ or her ‘adventures’, she thinks of romance while all those around her think of transgressive sexuality. She encounters prostitutes and actresses who are disguised as aristocrats or cross-dressed, recalling the disguises, substitutions and erotic intrigues that dominate Behn’s and Haywood’s narratives. Mr Tinsel’s snapshots of fashionable figures are rejected by Arabella as ‘detatched Pieces of Satire on particular Persons’ (VII.VIII), but at the same time they would have reminded the eighteenth-century reader of Manley’s distinctive style. Ostensibly parodying romance and disavowing scandal, Lennox reintroduces both into the history of the novel, while Arabella’s sympathetic cross-class and cross-historical identification with other women complicates the dominant mid-eighteenth-century model of female domesticity.

Arabella’s afterlives

Arabella’s adventures do seem to come to an end with her marriage to Glanville, but unlike Richardson’s sequel to Pamela, which shows the heroine constrained by marriage and suffering her husband’s attentions to another woman, we remain free to speculate beyond this novel’s conventional closure. Certainly, Arabella has an interesting afterlife in the sense that the novel continued to be read throughout the eighteenth

and early nineteenth centuries, generated translations across Europe and significantly influenced a number of subsequent literary texts. Miriam Rossiter Small documents a range of texts indebted to The Female Quixote,⁵⁹ including a play entitled Angelica; or Quixote in Petticoats (1758), whose heroine, like Arabella, insists on her absolute power over her lovers and who quotes from Mandara and Statira. George Colman’s farce Polly Honeycombe (produced at Drury Lane in 1760) features a heroine corrupted by reading the sentimental novels available at circulating libraries and who, like Arabella, mistakes servants

for gentlemen; Colman’s Preface cites three of Lennox’s titles (Harriot Stuart, Henrietta and The Memoirs of the Countess of Berci) in an extract from a circulating library catalogue. Many novels, such as The Spiritual Quixote (1773), focus on quixotic behaviour, but are as much indebted to Cervantes and Fielding as to Lennox. Elizabeth, Margaret and Jane Purbeck’s novel The History of Sir George Warrington; or, the Political Quixote (1797) was erroneously attributed to Lennox on the title page of the first edition; the novel includes a character called Charlotte Thornton, who elopes with her father’s servant because her head is full of false ideas derived from French romances, and the novel’s quixotic hero, George Warrington, almost dies because of his misplaced belief in democratic political theories, recovering as precipitously as Arabella when he learns that republicans are atheists.

Significantly, Jane Austen read Lennox’s most famous novel more than once, and in 1807 she wrote to her sister Cassandra that reading it ‘now makes our evening amusement; to me a very high one, as I find the work quite equal to what I remembered it.’⁶⁰ Northanger Abbey is, in many way, a tribute to and updating of The Female Quixote; Austen substitutes Gothic novels for French romances as the reading that misleads her young heroine, Catherine Morland, and like Lennox she qualifies her satire of ‘horrid novels’: Catherine’s misreading of real life is, to some extent, validated by General Tilney’s behaviour – she comes to believe that he did not kill his wife, but her ‘terror’ in his presence is well founded. General Tilney’s tyranny exposes the gothic qualities within the home, so that the English midland counties in the 1790s seem quite as terrifying as Ann Radcliffe’s historical romances set in southern Europe. Just as Lennox reclaimed romance, Austen reclaims gothic conventions to make a political comment on paternal power. Like her predecessor, she also undermines the conventional novelistic closure of marriage, self-consciously observing that her readers ‘will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity’.⁶¹

The novel that most obviously alludes to Lennox’s appeared on the other side of the Atlantic in 1801 (which suggests something of the transatlantic culture of novels during this period; The Female Quixote was certainly available in America). Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon was reprinted several times between 1801 and 1841. Tenney’s novel shares many features with Lennox’s: Dorcasina, like Arabella, loses her mother at an early age and is raised by her father in seclusion; each heroine has a faithful female servant; both have genuine suitors as well as impostors, and both fantasize that servants are gentlemen in disguise; both dress eccentrically. The two novels function as both nationalist and anti-romance warnings, with Arabella obsessed by seventeenth-century French romances and Dorcasina by mid-eighteenth-century English novels, especially the sentimental fiction of Richardson. But Female Quixotism is more resolutely didactic and anti-romantic than its predecessor: notably it does not conclude with the marriage of the heroine (or her sentimental death, the other dominant plot option), rather, we follow the heroine to unmarried, lonely old age, bereft of all her romantic delusions. Through its mockery of the effects of fashionable reading, the novel registers a conservative protest against the new, mobile social relations of Jeffersonian America.⁶²

After Elizabeth Gunning’s second marriage to the Duke of Argyll, Walpole exclaimed in a letter: ‘I would not venture to marry either of them [the two sisters] these thirty years, for fear of being shuffled out of the world prematurely, to make room for the rest of their adventures.’⁶³ Literary history did make room for Arabella’s continuing adventures, but most nineteenth- and twentieth-century creators of novelistic canons, from Sir Walter Scott to Ian Watt, ignored or marginalized them. However, recent literary and cultural critics have restored them and the sophisticated, speculative and ethical fiction in which they occur to their rightful place at the centre of debates about the novel in the mid eighteenth century. We trust that new readers, despite the intervening two and half centuries, will be as absorbed by Arabella as were Elizabeth Carter, Susanna Highmore and Samuel Richardson.

NOTES

I would like to thank our former editor at Penguin, Laura Barber, for her useful and graceful comments on earlier versions of this Introduction.

Quotations from the text are referenced by Book and Chapter number.

1. Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806), poet, linguist and correspondent, was part of a group of intellectual woman – the Bluestocking Circle – which flourished in London in the second half of the eighteenth century; other members included Hannah More, Hester Chapone, Mary Delany and Elizabeth Montagu (the ‘Queen of the Blues’). Carter, like Lennox, produced translations from French and Italian and contributed to Samuel Johnson’s Rambler (1750–52).

2. Quotations from Carter’s and Delany’s letters are from Miriam Rossiter Small, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox: An Eighteenth Century Lady of Letters (New Haven/London: Yale University Press/ Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 85. Despite some inaccuracies, Small’s study is a useful source of biographical and contextual information. See also Duncan Isles’s invaluable annotations to Lennox’s correspondence in ‘The Lennox Collection’, Harvard Library Bulletin 18.4 (1970), pp. 317–44; 19.1 (1971), pp. 36–60; 19.2, pp. 165–86; 19.4, pp. 416–35.

3. Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 223 (letter to Lady Bradshaigh).

4. Both Susanna Highmore (1725–1812) and Hester Chapone (1727–1801) were members of Richardson’s circle; Highmore married John Duncombe, author of The Feminiad. A Poem (1754), which celebrates the work of morally virtuous women writers; Chapone was friends with Bluestockings Carter and Montagu, wrote poems and essays and contributed fictional epistles to the Rambler. Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, addressed to a Young Lady (1773) is her most important work. Highmore is quoted in Small, Lennox, p. 86.

5. Richardson, Selected Letters, ed. Carroll, p. 223.

6. Small quotes from a late-nineteenth-century American biographical encyclopaedia that Lennox’s mother had died some time before her departure for England (Lennox, p. 4).

7. See Gustavus Howard Maynadier, The First American Novelist? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940).

8. See Isles, ‘The Lennox Collection’, Harvard Library Bulletin 19.1 (1971), p. 60, n. 121.

9. As Edward Copeland notes, £25 a year was the income of the labouring poor, while a single man living in London on £50 a year in 1767 had to practise a bitter economy (Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 24–7.

10. Letter to the Royal Literary Fund, dated 22 August 1793; reprinted in Small, Lennox, p. 59. She received £20 in 1802 to alleviate ‘urgent distress’, followed by a further 7 guineas in the same year, and a weekly allowance of one guinea established in 1803.

11. Ibid., pp. 57–8.

12. Ibid., pp. 8–10, for all quotations.

13. Subscription was a traditional mode of publication in the eighteenth century, whereby a list of subscribers, usually headed by an aristocratic or other influential patron, paid a small sum of money to defray publication costs; they would receive a copy of the book in question, in which their names would be listed.

14. See Small, Lennox, p. 126.

15. Reprinted in Henry Fielding: The Critical Heritage, ed. Ronald Paulson (London: Routledge, 1969), p. 271.

16. Quoted in Small, Lennox, p. 126.

17. Quoted in Isles, ‘The Lennox Collection’, Harvard Library Bulletin 19.4 (1971), p. 430.

18. The term ‘foible’ is used throughout the novel to describe Arabella’s apparently misguided reading of French romances as real history and as guides for her conduct. The term makes her failing seem trivial, amusing and feminine.

19. The editor of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters, published in 1861, notes in his Preface that Lady Mary ‘possessed, and left after her, the whole library of Mrs Lennox’s Female Quixote – Cleopatra, Cassandra, Clelia, Cyrus… etc., all, like the Lady Arabella’s collection, “Englished”, mostly by persons of honour’; quoted in Small, Lennox, pp. 87–8.

20. ‘The Covent Garden Journal, Numb. 24, Tuesday, March 24, 1752’, in Henry Fielding, The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register-Office, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 161.

21. Clare Reeve, The Progress of Romance through Times, Countries, and Manners, 2 vols. (1785; New York: Garland Publishing, 1970), vol. 2, pp. 6–7.

22. Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989), p. 153.

23. William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), p. 112. Warner provides a useful and entertaining account of this early tradition in fiction as ‘media culture’ (see, especially, pp. 45–127).

24. Mary Patricia Martin, ‘ “High and Noble Adventures”: Reading the Novel in The Female Quixote’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 31.1 (1997), p. 45. Martin is concerned with ‘the gendered rhetoric central to accounts of the new fiction’, particularly Lennox’s claiming of the novel as ‘women’s writing’ (p. 46).

25. Quoted in Martin, ‘ “High and Noble Adventures” ’, p. 47.

26. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler No. 4, 17th edn, 3 vols. (London: Rivington et al., 1816), vol. 1, p. 18.

27. Lennox’s debt to Richardson is explicit and the clergyman’s recommendation of Clarissa as acceptable and improving reading is unambiguous, but her implicit championing of Fielding is found throughout the novel. Lennox’s divided allegiance is interesting because it complicates a dominant model of literary history which links the success of female novelists to an increasing emphasis on domestic femininity, and which thus locates women novelists within the tradition of Richardson (the domesticity argument is most influentially made by Nancy Armstrong in her Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)).

28. Kate Levin, ‘ “The Cure of Arabella’s Mind”: Charlotte Lennox and the Disciplining of the Female Reader’, Women’s Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period 2.3 (1995), p. 276. Joseph F. Bartolomeo offers a detailed discussion of the intertextual relationship in ‘Female Quixotism v. “Feminine” Tragedy: Lennox’s Comic Revision of Clarissa’, in New Essays on Samuel Richardson, ed. Albert J. Rivero (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 163–75.

29. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749), Book IX, Ch. 5.

30. The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 414, note.

31. José Ortega y Gasset, ‘From Meditations on Quixote’, in Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, ed. Michael McKeon (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 282, 283.

32. ‘The Covent Garden Journal’ (see note 20), p. 160. See also endnote 1, Book I.

33. See endnote 36, Book IX.

34. Scott Paul Gordon discusses Lennox’s regeneration of ‘romance values’ in ‘The Space of Romance in Lennox’s Female Quixote’, Studies in English Literature 38.3 (1998), pp. 500, 502ff.

35. See Martin on Charlotte’s ‘parochial sensibility’, ‘ “High and Noble Adventures” ’, p. 56.

36. Quoted in Norah Waugh, Corsets and Crinolines (1954; New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1981), p. 62.

37. Ibid.

38. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818); Vol. I, ch. 5. Of course, Northanger Abbey itself pays tribute to The Female Quixote, replaying Arabella’s romance-induced ‘delusions’ through Catherine Morland’s gothic-induced ones.

39. On the imperial connotations of Arabella’s veil, see Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 114–26.

40. Isles, ‘The Lennox Collection’, Harvard Library Bulletin 18.4 (1970), p. 339.

41. See Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 160.

42. See excerpt in Vivien Jones, ed., Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 170–74.

43. Ibid., p. 176.

44. Quoted in Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, p. 165.

45. Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4), Vol. IV, Letter XXII.

46. Lennox may have known Dodd; in a letter to Johnson, she hopes for ‘a reprieve for poor Dr Dodd’, who had been convicted of forgery, and who was hanged in June 1777 (Small, Lennox, p. 51).

47. Frances Burney, Evelina (1778), Vol. II, Letters XXII and XV.

48. Reynolds’s portrait of Elizabeth Gunning appears on the cover of this edition. Lennox herself sat for Reynolds in 1761; according to Small, two engravings exist of this portrait (Lennox, pp. 33–4; the 1813 Cook engraving produced for the memoir of Lennox in the Lady’s Monthly Magazine appears in Small’s biography).

49. It is worth noting that the circumstances of Elizabeth’s marriage are the stuff of romance: the debauched Duke of Hamilton fell in love with her at a masquerade and six weeks later coerced a parson to marry them late at night in an impromptu ceremony at Mayfair Chapel, using a ring from the bed curtain as a wedding ring; after the death of her first husband, Elizabeth married the Duke of Argyll.

50. ‘Woman of the town’ was a common term for a prostitute.

51. Mrs Delany to Mrs Dewes, 10 November 1754, Autobiography and Correspondence of Mrs Delany, revised from Lady Llanover’s edition, ed. Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, 2 vols. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1880), vol. 1, p. 453.

52. The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Oxford, ed. Mrs Paget Toynbee, 16 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), vol. 3, pp. 68–104; vol. 4, pp. 241, 245.

53. The Charms of Beauty; or, the Grand Contest between the Fair Hibernians, and the English Toasts, A Poem… (London: J. Gifford, 1752).

54. On the Countess’s historicization of romance, see note 34 above and Christine Roulston, ‘Histories of Nothing: Romance and Femininity in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote’, Women’s Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period 2.1 (1995), p. 36.

55. Johnson’s praise of Richardson appeared in the opening lines of Rambler 97 (19 February 1751). See also endnote 36, Book IX.

56. See Martin, ‘ “High and Noble Adventures” ’, p. 45.

57. Quoted by Dalziel (ed.), Introduction to Lennox, Female Quixote, p. xviii.

58. See Kate Levin, “The Cure of Arabella’s Mind”: Charlotte Lennox and the disciplining of the female reader’, Women’s Writing 2.3 (1995), P. 278.

59. See Small, Lennox, pp. 99–117.

60. Letter to Cassandra Austen, 7 January 1807, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. R. W. Chapman, 2nd corrected edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 173.

61. Austen, Northanger Abbey, Vol. II, ch. 31.

62. It should be noted also that in transmuting her material for a new cultural context, Tabitha Tenny produces a more boisterously farcical version of her heroine’s escapades in Female Quixotism, ed. Jean Nienkamp and Andrea Collins (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

63. Letters of Walpole, ed. Toynbee, vol. 4, p. 232.