SOURCE: Ross, Deborah. “The Female Quixote: A Realistic Fairy Tale.” In The Excellence of Falsehood: Romance, Realism, and Women's Contribution to the Novel, pp. 94-109. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1991.

In the following essay, Ross expounds on Lennox's interests in “the relation between philosophy and narrative form.”

We are handsome, my dear Charlotte, very handsome and the greatest of our Perfections is, that we are entirely insensible of them ourselves.

—Jane Austen¹

Charlotte Lennox's second novel, The Female Quixote (1752), delighted Fielding, Johnson, and even the Bluestockings and signaled the author's acceptance into the London literary scene. As she earned respect as a serious scholar and translator, she came in contact with reigning authorities on fiction and acquired a knack for predicting what a wide range of readers would like. Learned yet light, traditional yet original, The Female Quixote is a deft mixture of elements designed to satisfy...