SOURCE: Roulston, Christine. “Histories of Nothing: Romance and Femininity in Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote.” Women's Writing 2, no. 1 (1995): 25-42.

In the following essay, Roulston examines the interrelationship between femininity and the romance genre as well as between the novel and the romance.

In recent years, Charlotte Lennox's novel The Female Quixote has received growing critical attention as a work which addresses the complex relationship between femininity and the romance form.¹ Published at a time when the distinction between romance and the novel was still ill-defined, Lennox's novel stages the confrontation between these two literary genres as one which is indelibly bound up with the question of gender representation. In his introduction to Romance and the Novel 1700-1800, Ioan Williams argues that “critics were agreed in distinguishing between the novel and the romance as between realistic and idealistic fiction, though the term ‘romance’ was still used in a more...