SOURCE: Labbie, Erin F. “History as ‘Retro’: Veiling Inheritance in Lennox's The Female Quixote.” Bucknell Review 42, no. 1 (1998): 79-97.

In the following essay, Labbie asserts that Arabella's refashioning of narratives and history subverts the didactic nature of the romance novel.

The effects of Romance and true History are not very different.

—Clare Reeves, The Progress of Romance

Truth and appearances and reality, power … [woman] is—by virtue of her inexhaustible aptitude for mimicry—the living support of all the staging/production of the world. Variously veiled according to the epochs of history.

—Luce Irigaray, “Veiled Lips”

Irigaray's claim regarding the mutability of the performance of “woman” cited in the epigraph above,¹ also calls into question a notion of performative aspects of history and, in so doing, signals key issues at play in a historiographical discussion of Charlotte Lennox's novel The Female Quixote (1752).² As I will argue in this essay...