SOURCE: Spacks, Patricia Meyer. “The Subtle Sophistry of Desire: Dr. Johnson and The Female Quixote.” Modern Philology 85, no. 4 (May 1988): 532-42.

In the following essay, Spacks considers Samuel Johnson's response to the themes of truth, fiction, and desire in Lennox's novel.

“Truth is … not often welcome for its own sake,” Samuel Johnson wrote in Rambler no. 96; “it is generally unpleasing because contrary to our wishes and opposite to our practice.”¹ In the story Johnson constructs, the personified figure of Falsehood wins popular approval “because she took the shape that was most engaging, and always suffered herself to be dressed and painted by Desire.” Trying to please the people, Truth arrays herself the same way. “The Muses wove in the loom of Pallas, a loose and changeable robe, like that in which Falsehood captivated her admirers; with this they invested Truth, and named her Fiction. She now went out again...