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Article: The space of romance in Lennox's 'Female Quixote.' (1752 novel by Charlotte Lennox)
- Article from:
- Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
- Article date:
- June 22, 1998
- Author:
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Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote (1752) seems to join a pervasive eighteenth-century effort to dispel as "unreal" and dangerous the romance tradition that English readers had valued for two hundred years. Lennox's heroine, deluded by reading romance, seems to emblematize the irrelevancy of romance to "real life"; when Arabella is "cured" by the Johnsonian "good Doctor," who indicts romances as "empty Fictions" that "vitiate the Mind, and pervert the Understanding," the text's rejection of romance seems complete.(1) Many critics endorse this reading: Laurie Langbauer argues, "Arabella's excesses of behavior actually reflect what is wrong with romance . . Through her, The ...