SOURCE: Gordon, Scott Paul. “The Space of Romance in Lennox's Female Quixote.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 38, no. 3 (summer 1998): 499-516.

In the following essay, Gordon argues that while Lennox's novel critiques the genre of romance, it does not reject the genre entirely.

I. Satire or Romance?

Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote (1752) seems to join a pervasive eighteenth-century effort to dispel as “unreal” and dangerous the romance tradition that English readers had valued for two hundred years. Lennox's heroine, deluded by reading romance, seems to emblematize the irrelevancy of romance to “real life”; when Arabella is “cured” by the Johnsonian “good Doctor,” who indicts romances as “empty Fictions” that “vitiate the Mind, and pervert the Understanding,” the text's rejection of romance seems complete.¹ Many critics endorse this reading: Laurie Langbauer argues, “Arabella's excesses of behavior actually reflect what is wrong with romance … Through her, The Female Quixote shows that romance...