SOURCE: Gardiner, Ellen. “Writing Men Reading in Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote.”¹ Studies in the Novel 28, no. 1 (spring 1996): 1-11.

In the following essay, Gardiner argues that The Female Quixote should be read as literary criticism.

The Female Quixote (1752) has remained a fairly marginal text in twentieth-century histories of the novel because any number of critics have explicated it as primarily revealing Charlotte Lennox's and women's vexed relationship to the romance.² These readings neglect, however, Lennox's more complex argument about the way in which the term romance functions in her novel. In The Female Quixote, Lennox points to eighteenth-century literary culture's use of romance as a tool with which to exclude readers and writers from participation in the new profession of literary reviewership on the basis of class and gender.³ In this essay, I will read The Female Quixote not as romance, but as a form of literary criticism...