Literary historian F. L. Patee has described Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism (1801) as the most popular novel written in America prior to the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Although Patee's statement is something of an exaggeration, Female Quixotism did go through at least five editions and was still in print when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her landmark book. Tenney's importance is better gauged by her skill rather than her popularity. Female Quixotism is remarkable as a satire on the consequences of too much novel reading, as a critique of the American educational system, and as a forerunner of a comic tradition in American fiction.

As is often the case with women who lived in earlier centuries, little is known about Tabitha Tenney's life except as it relates to the lives of her father and her husband. Born in Exeter, New Hampshire, she was descended from some of the first...