SOURCE: Martin, Mary Patricia. “‘High and Noble Adventures’: Reading the Novel in The Female Quixote.” Novel 31, no. 1 (fall 1997): 45-62.

In the following essay, Martin presents Lennox's novel as a study of literary genres.

Near the end of Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, the heroine Arabella falls into a dangerous fever, the consequence of having thrown herself into the Thames to escape—for the sake of her “immortal Glory”—the ravishers she imagines are pursuing her (363). Afraid that she is near death, she “desir[es] with great Earnestness the Assistance of some worthy Divine” to prepare her for this eventuality (366). Though Arabella does recover “the Health of her Body,” the Divine is yet more concerned with the “Cure of Arabella's Mind” (368), warned as he has been by her lover Mr. Glanville of the “Disorders Romances had occasion'd in her Imagination” (367). Indeed, Arabella herself, chastened by her recent illness, charges...