SOURCE: Motooka, Wendy. “Coming to a Bad End: Sentimentalism, Hermeneutics, and The Female Quixote.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8, no. 2 (January 1996): 251-70.

In the following essay, Motooka analyzes the ending of The Female Quixote by addressing the feminist significance of quixotism.

Readers of Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752) often leave the book feeling that the heroine, Arabella, has come to a bad end—in both senses of the phrase. Until the penultimate chapter, Arabella is a strong, independent, admirably spirited woman. The final scenes of the novel, however, depict her as defeated, humiliated, and subordinated by a dogmatic clergyman. What had seemed a glorious feminist spark disappointingly fizzles into an unremarkable marriage that returns woman to her proper place.¹ Even if Arabella's concession to the patriarchy is not lamented per se, the abruptness of her alteration is: “the ending should have been more artistically contrived,” writes one critic, while another speculates...