SOURCE: Thomson, Helen. “Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote: A Novel Interrogation.” In Living By The Pen: Early British Women Writers, edited by Dale Spender, pp. 113-25. New York: Teachers College Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Thomas regards Lennox as crucial to the development of the English novel.

With the appearance of The Female Quixote in 1752, Charlotte Lennox became not only one of the early mothers of the novel, but also one of the novel's earliest critics. As in Miguel de Cervantes' great novel Don Quixote, to which Charlotte Lennox's title pays tribute, in her second work of fiction she was simultaneously inventing and deconstructing the novel in a manner we might now be tempted to call postmodern, yet at the same time she was apparently bidding farewell to the romance as a superseded form of fiction. (See Margaret M. Doody, 1989, for an authoritative, insightful study of Charlotte Lennox's...