SOURCE: Thomson, Helen. “Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote: A Novel Interrogation.” In Living By The Pen: Early British Women Writers, edited by Dale Spender, pp. 113-25. New York: Teachers College Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Thomas regards Lennox as crucial to the development of the English novel.]

With the appearance of The Female Quixote in 1752, Charlotte Lennox became not only one of the early mothers of the novel, but also one of the novel's earliest critics. As in Miguel de Cervantes' great novel Don Quixote, to which Charlotte Lennox's title pays tribute, in her second work of fiction she was simultaneously inventing and deconstructing the novel in a manner we might now be tempted to call postmodern, yet at the same time she was apparently bidding farewell to the romance as a superseded form of fiction. (See Margaret M. Doody, 1989, for an authoritative, insightful study of Charlotte Lennox's life and writings.) Romance had served women well, its incorporation of chivalric and courtly codes gave women a position of power and influence they were very unlikely to find in real life. The extreme contrast between the privileged position of women in the romances and the realities of lived experience for most female romance readers of the time, is sufficient explanation for the enduring appeal of the genre. Charlotte Lennox had discovered that in her case the economic protection of marriage was a sham, and by the time The Female Quixote appeared she had become the professional author she was to remain for the rest of her life. She had been acknowledged as such since the appearance of her first work, Harriot Stuart, in 1750, a tale of female adventure which owed much to Lennox's first-hand knowledge of North America, where she evidently spent part of her youth. (See Margaret M. Doody, 1989: p. xviii, for a discussion of Lennox's first novel and its treatment of romance.)

Samuel Johnson, Samuel Richardson, and later, Henry Fielding welcomed Charlotte Lennox to their writing ranks, but it is not only in relation to her male peers that she interests us now, except as a melancholy demonstration of how their high valuation of her work has not saved it from subsequent neglect. To the complications of her sex and role—as a woman writer her authority was undermined by a patriarchal society which, at least in theory, made “woman writer” a contradiction in terms, then as now—Charlotte Lennox adds the complications of an intensively self-reflexive fiction. Far from being the simple satire on the dangers of romance reading that it has often been taken to be, The Female Quixote critically examines the nature of fiction itself, its relation to the imagination and feelings, as well as to the real world. If at the historically critical time of 1752 one form of fiction, the romance, was to be replaced by another, the novel, then Charlotte Lennox dramatizes the event and its significance, but not by simply acquiescing in the supposition that one is inferior to the other.

Charlotte Lennox was as aware as any modern publisher's editor that romance can play a psychological role for women. Her heroine, Arabella, may appear to be deluded by the romances she has read, but they provide her with a way of interpreting her own life and experience. She recognizes a truth in them, a truth to feeling at least, which has nothing to do with probability. The Female Quixote is a feminized version of an otherwise masculinist battle between the Ancients and the Moderns. Women may have been barred access to Greek and Latin, but the romances provided alternative versions of an ancient world, one, moreover, where women held sway by virtue of their hold on men's feelings. Thus Lennox pointed the way towards the great mid-eighteenth-century shift in sensibility when the Age of Reason, presided over by Samuel Johnson, crumpled before the onslaught of the sentimental novel. This led in turn not only to the Romantic movement, but to women's fiction in particular developing modes which liberated the feelings and the imagination. Ann Radcliffe dominated Gothic fiction, and other women such as Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley asserted a feminism which elevated the female feeling heart into a badge of moral courage.

On the surface, The Female Quixote repudiates the romances with their improbabilities of plot and exaggerations of feeling, in favor of the masculine world of reality and, furthermore, uses the voices of male authority, Samuel Johnson and Samuel Richardson, for example, to bring about its validation and its heroine's change of mind. Yet, as we shall see, another woman has prepared the way for Arabella's recognition of error which also comes about only when her own heart has given her definitive proof that the romances have served their purpose, and it is time to replace a fictional prince with a real husband.

The price of this is marriage, a legal loss of identity for the woman and a subjugation to the will of the man. No wonder the courtship novel became the dominant form of women's fiction in the remainder of the eighteenth century, the didacticism serving to consolidate patriarchal authority, but also asserting for women not only a right to choose, but a right to love, and the necessity for careful evaluation. The first way in which the romances serve Arabella is in protracting her period of courtship, that critical time when she will enjoy power over her lover, which may vanish after marriage and in which she can ensure that the most crucial choice of her life is the correct one. Further, by turning herself into a heroine of romance, Arabella makes of her lover Glanville a hero whose sole function is to serve his mistress. This is a fantasy any woman might cherish, because it represents a reversal of the normal power relationship between the sexes.

It is little wonder the masculine characters, Arabella's father, uncle, and Glanville, resist. Her persistence has its risks—her uncle thinks her mad more than once—but it succeeds in testing Glanville's heart and in teaching him to be her loyal knight, whose function is solely to please his mistress and shield her from criticism. This process is conducted through the romance texts; Arabella succeeds in getting Glanville to speak to her through the language of romance, a metaphoric language of love. Arabella's husband is chosen for her by her father, a family and property alliance which is to be brought about by a few weeks of courtship, during which Arabella will be brought to acquiescence. She is extremely shocked at what amounts to the theft of the romantic courtship she had imagined for herself:

…for, though she always intended to marry some time or other, as all the heroines had done, yet she thought such an event ought to be brought about with an infinite deal of trouble; and that it was necessary she should pass to this state through a great number of cares, disappointments, and distresses of various kinds, like them; that her lover should purchase her with his sword from a crowd of rivals; and arrive to the possession of her heart by many years of service and fidelity.

(p. 29)

She shows considerable ingenuity in bringing about a more interesting courtship for herself, despite the fact that her cousin is attractive to her, her father is not tyrannical, and that no real heroine ever submitted to parental choice: “What lady in romance ever married the man that was chosen for her?” (p. 29). Her choosing to construct herself and her life as a romance is an act of rebellion, more covert than outright defiance, but ultimately more effective. The constraints under which she lives may have been considered unremarkable for the time, but they are considerable. She has, in fact, been shut up in a castle quite as totally as any fairy tale princess (indeed the Cinderella motif is in the background; she is motherless, with Miss Glanville playing the role of the Ugly Sister and the Countess of ——— the Fairy godmother), and her father has total power over her. He can force her to write to Glanville, recalling him after his first repulse, and forbid her freedom of movement—he allows her only an occasional ride or visit to church. These are the same constraints endured by her mother during her mercifully brief marriage, and the romances which helped her endure her solitary life are the only maternal inheritance Arabella has (Margaret M. Doody, p. xxi). It's not surprising that she'd cling to this, particularly when, as the single female child, she is only the means by which the paternal inheritance will pass, on her marriage, to her husband.

The romances have enriched Arabella's life with their imaginative possibilities, and it is the possession of a strong imagination which is Arabella's best weapon. Dr. Johnson may have feared the imagination's power and its alliance to madness, but female writers such as Charlotte Lennox correctly recognized its liberating potential, at least for her own sex. The 18th century's private madhouses and their female inhabitants constituted the dark side of this possibility, as Mary Wollstonecraft was to uncover in her Maria: and the Wrongs of Woman.

Some of the novel's episodes discover Arabella's libido at work constructing wish-fulfillment sexual fantasies. Before Glanville appears, she sees two young men who interest her and sets about creating adventure and excitement for herself. Mr. Hervey, first seen at church, is encountered on one of her rarely permitted rides, whereupon “… her imagination immediately suggested to her, that this insolent lover had a design to seize her person” (p. 21). Her response to the young man's puzzled question, “What do you take me for?” is comic in its apparently inappropriate romance exaggeration:

For a ravisher, interrupted Arabella, an impious ravisher! who, contrary to all laws, both human and divine, endeavour to possess your self by force of a person whom you are not worthy to serve; and whose charity and compassion you have returned with the utmost ingratitude.

(p. 22)

This may be the stuff of romance, but Charlotte Lennox's readers know, even if they have not read Clarissa, that rape and abduction were real and not fanciful dangers for unprotected women. Arabella then achieves two things which reinforce her delusion. Struggling in the hands of her servants, Hervey is driven to threats of real violence, “… if I can but free one of my hands, I'll stab the scoundrel before your face” (p. 22). Arabella's response is calm, and she insists upon the appropriate romance power relationship: “A little more submission and respect would become you better; you are now wholly in my power: I may, if I please, carry you to my father, and have you severely punished for your attempt” (p. 22). Here, as in every instance of Arabella's so-called romance delusion in the novel, reality impinges on the fantasy. Well aware that she could, in fact, make good her threats, Hervey submits to her orders “… knowing that an attempt of that nature upon an heiress might have dangerous consequences” (p. 22).

This kind of demonstration of a common underlying truth shared by both fantasy and fact is a very good reason for Arabella's slowness to be convinced she is in error. The later encounter with the highwaymen on the road to Bath is an all too common eighteenth-century adventure for travelers. Arabella's comic misapprehension—she thinks they are knights mistakenly trying to rescue the two women from the hands of abductors—underlines the tendency of romance to convert everything into a sexual currency (albeit in the form of literary metaphor), which forces men into one of two roles, villain or protector. The highwaymen want to rob them of their money, but in the moneyless world of the romance, chastity may be a woman's only fortune. Lennox makes sure we understand in many other episodes that this is still precisely the case for women of her own time.

Arabella's encounter with Miss Groves (whose name ironically evokes the world of the pastoral, another kind of romance), is a case in point. Charlotte Lennox's inclusion of a subtextual “Ruined Woman” story is in tune with the didactic function assumed by the novel, but her treatment of it subverts, to a degree, the support it usually gives the patriarchal disposition of power and the sexual double standard. Arabella's own purity, chastity, modesty, and innocence ensure her misunderstanding of the common story of a young girl betrayed by her passions, and she has little difficulty in finding a romance precedent with which to innocently interpret the tale. But Charlotte Lennox includes two mitigating circumstances in the story. Miss Groves has been badly brought up, allowed her own will and boisterous pursuits by a mother whose task should have been to tutor her daughter in restraint and decorum. Instead she “… was sent up to London, and allowed to be her own mistress at sixteen; to which unpardonable neglect of her mother she owes the misfortunes that have since befallen her” (p. 80). In spite of her two illegitimate births (the absolute power of her faithless lover demonstrated by his taking the second, live infant and refusing her access or even knowledge of the child) “… he will not be persuaded to inform her how, or in what manner, he has disposed of the child” (p. 84), Miss Groves is married in the end and not allowed to suffer the usual tragic fate of the fallen woman. But having been married for her looks and her money does not make her fate any more than ordinary for the time.

More importantly, however, this episode is used to introduce the novel's far more effectively subversive demonstration that language is not always the straightforward tool of philosophical empiricism it was claimed to be, that the reality it names is complex and ambiguous. When Miss Groves's maid, Mrs. Morris, tells her mistress's secrets to Arabella, we are treated to the comedy of the dual perspective of the one story being told and understood by us, while quite another is being heard and misunderstood by Arabella. Her high-flown language, borrowed from the romances, has been employed to comic effect from the start, but when Mrs. Morris tells her story in the ordinary language of the 18th century, we suddenly understand that much of the romance vocabulary has been appropriated and devalued by conversion into a series of euphemisms for sexual misbehavior. Thus a woman who has a “history” full of “adventures” and who accepted “favors” is a woman of ill-repute, not the heroine of an exciting romance whom Arabella takes her to be. It is language that has changed, not human nature or behavior. Thus the reliability of language to convey the truth is weakened and its fixity made uncertain. In this episode, Charlotte Lennox effectively deconstructs the language of romance, but in doing so also destabilizes current usage. There is not much to choose after all between the romance usage, recording improbable happenings, and the contemporary usage, clothing reality in the disguise of euphemistic metaphor. Once again, it is hardly surprising that Arabella persists in her delusions, when the alternative seems no closer to the “real” world.

Charlotte Lennox appears to have been familiar with the philosophy of John Locke, and indeed he is invoked in Arabella's final conversion, but Lennox's fine intelligence understood that his empiricism had not pinned down reality any more firmly than hitherto. In the episode of Edward, the gardener, she demonstrates that what the eye sees is not necessarily the same as what another eye sees, or rather, how another observer interprets sensory data. Princes are always handsome, and Arabella understands at once, when she sees the good-looking young gardener in her employ, that he is a disguised prince who naturally aspires for her hand. All princes are handsome; Edward is handsome; therefore, Edward is a disguised prince. Given the narrowness of Arabella's experience, this is no more ridiculous than some of the social games the bewildered heroine sees played in Bath and London.

Arabella's unwavering adherence to the high ideals of romance saves her from succumbing to the villain of the novel, Glanville's friend, Sir George Bellmour, who loves Arabella's fortune and pretty face, yet does not have Glanville's superior regard for her character. He sees his own familiarity with Arabella's romances as a means to win her favor, and in the telling of his “history” in the approved romance style, hopes to win her heart. He is fittingly defeated, not by any discrepancy between the real and the fantasy version of it, but because in ironically translating his own sexual transgressions and emotional infidelities into the vehicle of romance—which he presumes will amusingly disguise them—he is detected by Arabella, because his faithlessness breaks the rules of romantic fidelity. Once again, it is hardly surprising that Arabella's belief in the romance world is not shaken: it has a clear moral superiority to the alternative “real” world.

In this episode, Charlotte Lennox reverses her heroine's narrative metaphor; she sets up a complex, metafictional situation in which real adventures are presented as fiction, where the true is told as “false” to part of the audience, and the false romance tale told as true to the credulous Arabella. It is a clear demonstration of the dangers as well as complexity of fiction. It is amusing for those listeners who already know Sir George's history to hear his attempted seduction of Dolly, the milkmaid, converted into an Arcadian idyll with Dorothea, the shepherdess. Yet it is entirely fitting that Sir George should fail to disguise the moral ugliness of his womanizing in the idealized form of romance, for its empowerment of women seems less dangerous than the use men make of their power over women in ordinary life. In fact, the crucial turning point in Arabella's final conversion comes about only when it is pointed out that the exaggerated power of women in the romances could result in the needless suffering and destruction of men. These books “teach women to exact vengeance” and expect “human sacrifices,” the Doctor tells her.

It is hardly surprising that a female author, bidding farewell not simply to a time-honored form of fiction, but also to all the “women's knowledge” contained within the romance, should ask us to consider the form which is replacing it, and how it might serve women. If the novel is to possess verisimilitude, probability and a didactic function, as well as entertaining its readers, then the heroic role becomes a virtual impossibility for women, given their position in eighteenth-century society. Arabella is a transitional figure, the last to claim romantic status for herself (until Jane Austen makes Catherine Morland victim to romance delusion in Northanger Abbey), and she must be divested of this in the end. Within this novel, Lennox holds out little hope of heroism being found amongst modern young women. Charlotte Glanville has had all the advantages of wealth and class and, presumably, an education considered appropriate to her rank, yet she is infinitely inferior to Arabella, most crucially in terms of her moral nature. That the romances have produced the highest moral character in Arabella is constantly stressed—but can the novel, this novel subtextually asks, achieve the same things for women?

The linguistic misunderstandings in the Miss Groves story are used to comic effect. The apparently similar episode of the “chocolate quarrel” between Miss Glanville and Arabella points to the qualitative difference of character between two women of equal rank. Arabella, having rejected Sir George's advances and received a parodic, hyperbolic letter from him threatening to take his own life, following first her notions of honor and secondly the dictates of compassion, decides to visit him and command him to recover, as many of her romance heroines had done in similar circumstances. Miss Glanville is shocked at this impropriety, while Arabella decries modern courtship practices. Arabella sums up their quarrel:

Miss Glanville maintains, that it is less criminal in a lady to hear persons talk to her of love, allow them to kiss her hand, and permit them to write to her, than to make a charitable visit to a man who is confined to his bed through the violence of his passion and despair; the intent of this visit being only to prevent the death of an unfortunate lover, and, if necessary, to lay her commands upon him to live.

(p. 206)

Underlying the clash of codes here and complicating judgment is the genuine good feeling on the one hand, and the cynical husband-hunting flirtatiousness, on the other. Further complicating all this and allowing a comic resolution are the facts that Sir George is lying, and Charlotte and Glanville are jealous. Yet again, however, Arabella is surely right in preferring to adhere to the code of the romances, understanding as she does its underlying moral idealism. It is to Glanville's credit, despite his refusal to read the romances and readiness to condemn them unread, that he does gradually learn not only to comply with the desirable rules of behavior for a lover, but to see that in Arabella, at least, they have produced a morally superior character. He has already perceived her intelligence and beauty. What better education, does the eighteenth century offer for a woman? This is a challenge which the women novelists were themselves to take up as the century proceeded.

The romances, and Arabella, are really put to the test when she ventures into the world of society, in Bath, for the first time. Once again she is victorious, not only in thwarting Charlotte's malice by eliciting admiration not derision in her dress, modeled on that of a romance heroine (her costume the outward sign of her construction of herself in a fictional role), but in routing, with superior wit, logic, knowledge, and devastatingly effective conviction, the phony male “intellectuals” of Bath. The universally admired historian, Mr. Selvin, in reality very poorly read in the Ancients he cites as authority, is unmasked as a sham in conversation with the better (romance) read Arabella. Here the Ancients are quite clearly associated with the masculine, the Moderns with the non-canonical romances of the feminine discourse—which is victorious. At this point in the novel, above all, Charlotte Lennox seems in possession of a postmodern sense of history: “History is no longer a movement along the files of time. It is a set of myths inhabiting the present” (Helen Carr, 1989, p. 11).

In the artificial world of Bath, Arabella shines not only because she adheres to a higher code of behavior, but because her candor and honesty are in such welcome contrast to the practices of hypocritical display there. The question of the appropriateness and the usefulness of female romance reading, as an alternative to the normative social employment of women, is explicitly raised when in Bath Arabella surprises Charlotte by regretting the loss of her books and solitude. In reply to Charlotte's catalogue of the pump-room, the parade, the parties of pleasure, Arabella replies:

What room, I pray you, does a lady give for high and noble adventures, who consumes her days in dressing, dancing, listening to songs, and ranging the walks with people as thoughtless as herself? How mean and contemptible a figure must a life spent in such idle amusements make in history? Or rather, are not such persons always buried in oblivion; and can any pen be found who would condescend to record such inconsiderable actions?

(p. 314)

As is so often the case in this novel, the question goes beyond that of female education, of women's role in their society, to raise the question of the fictional depiction of women. If the novel is to be deprived of Arabellas and is left merely with Miss Glanvilles, how can it fulfill the highest aim of fiction, its didactic purpose? And where are women writers and readers to look for role models? The women novelists who followed were to take up the challenge, but Charlotte Lennox seems to have understood the difficulties which, in fact, led to some decades of female writing that complied with masculine notions of decorum, rather than challenged them. It was not until the revolutionary years of the 1790s that this changed.

From Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) to Fanny Burney's Evelina (1778), there were many examples of female writing which warned young women of the dangers of rebelling against the constraints of the socially accepted female role. One of the first voices raised against the tyranny of female “duty” which made young women powerless was Frances Sheridan's The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1767) where compliance to the ideal of filial duty had disastrous results for the heroine. In the main, however, it was the much later writing of Mary Wollstonecraft, along with novels such as Mary Hays's The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), which made a powerful plea for women's entitlement to a fuller and more honest emotional life. Female fiction in the 18th century can be read as a series of alternations between conservative strategies of survival on the best terms offered in a male-controlled world, and brave voices of radical protest. Charlotte Lennox's play with woman as already textualized (the romance heroine), assuming the power of fiction extended to real life (the novel heroine), represented a remarkably sophisticated subversive technique in this ongoing debate about women's problematical social role.

In suggesting that a loss of authority in the heroines of fiction would inevitably result in a loss of authority for the woman writers, Lennox indicates her impressive understanding of the problems of gender and writing. Sir George's history, which is merely and unsuccessfully parodic, provides us with one example of a confident but inept male fiction-maker. His interpolated story is false fiction, a kind of ingenious plagiarism: his attempt is to seduce Arabella by using her own literary codes. Charlotte Lennox's triumph, in contrast, is to have created a wonderfully original story and heroine out of the very problems of fiction-making itself. She indicates quite early in the novel that such a task has its difficulties, in the comic parody of the female romancer tutoring a disciple in the craft and its rules. When Lucy is instructed how to relate her mistress's history, the girl's naivety is used to question authorship itself. Lucy, like Cervantes' Sancho Panza, has an imperfect knowledge of the romance originals and lacks the essential imaginative act of faith that has blurred the distinction between real and fictional in her mistress.

“How can I make a history about your ladyship?” she asks, only to have Arabella deny the necessity for fiction at all. “There is no occasion, replied Arabella, for you to make a history: there are accidents enough in my life to afford matter for a long one: all you have to do is relate them as exactly as possible” (p. 134). The motif of the servant telling her mistress's story has already been used with Miss Groves, where the actual happenings of her life had reduced a “history” to scandalous gossip. Arabella's high-minded understanding of the word is ludicrous, only in the absence of immortality and scandal in her own life, not in its intention to valorize female experience. Yet Lennox reveals that the novel has jettisoned the higher version of “history” for the version that only records sexual misdemeanors. As for the authoritative masculine version of history, grounded in the classics, to which Mr. Selvin appeals in Bath, Arabella triumphs thereby revealing its sources to be “made” and as much the discourse of power and fiction as the romances.

The naive Lucy is used to subvert authorship even more thoroughly when she replies to Arabella: “Indeed madam, … I can't pretend to tell his thoughts; for how should I know what they were? None but himself can tell that” (p. 136). Here is the novel writer questioning the authority of authorship itself. Lucy's literal-mindedness satirizes the necessity to invent what cannot empirically be known by one human of another. The question invites us to deconstruct authorship in a postmodern fashion, and the key value it appeals to is the imagination—the exercise of it in the author and the shared belief in the reader. Arabella's imaginative act of faith in her reading of the romances is not really different in kind from the same act of faith required of novel readers, who are at one level believers in the “reality” of the fiction. After all, the central irony of The Female Quixote is that Arabella all along sees her life as furnishing material for a romance, with herself as heroine, when, in fact, her “history” is made into a novel, a form of fiction which sets itself in opposition to the so-called improbabilities of romance.

Some readers of The Female Quixote are disappointed that Arabella's conversion is not brought about by her female mentor, the Countess of ——— (whose excellence of character as well as “sense, learning and judgment” [p. 360] suggest her real-life counterpart was Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle). However, this is not a fairy tale with a convenient all-powerful fairy godmother, but a novel, reflecting the patriarchal realities of power relations between the sexes and the formal relinquishing of the feminine values of the romance to the masculine requirements of “reality.” The Countess reveals the awful truth to Arabella, that a woman of “honor” in the eighteenth century can have no history at all, for her worth in the eyes of the world hinges totally on her chastity.

“But custom, madam, said Arabella, cannot possibly change the nature of virtue or vice: and since virtue is the chief characteristic of a hero, a hero in the last age will be a hero in this” (p. 366). The reply points, as many other incidents in the novel have done, to the unreliability of naming, of language as a medium of truth. “Though the natures of virtue or vice cannot be changed, replied the Countess, yet they may be mistaken; and different principles, customs and education, may probably change their names if not their natures” (p. 366). She later adds, “It is certain, therefore, madam, that what was virtue in those days, is vice in ours” (p. 367). It is hardly surprising that this fails to convince Arabella, whose life experience has only reinforced her impression of the comparative superiority of fictional experience offered in the romances. Modern life has consistently disappointed Arabella, and ironically the Countess fails, because she appeals to the masculine attributes of “wit and good sense” (p. 363) in Arabella. It is, in fact, from masculine teachers that she will learn the truth conveyed through the feminine mode of feeling. It is her heart that converts Arabella, not her head, and in that Lennox perhaps scores her final triumph for the romances over the ultimate victory represented by the novel as the emergent and dominant fictional form.

It is Sir George's second attempt to ensnare Arabella through a false romance, that begins the crucial change of heart. His prostitute who successfully convinces Arabella not only that she is the Princess of Gaul, but that her lost lover is none other than Glanville, arouses a strength of emotion in Arabella which surprises her. Discovering, as the wily Sir George well knows, that the laws of romance demand that she should relinquish Glanville to the Princess (shortly after Arabella has contested the supremacy of the laws of the land with Glanville, maintaining the absolute sovereignty of the “empire of love,” p. 357), she is quite overcome. “Our charming heroine, ignorant till now of the true state of her heart, was surprised to find it assaulted at once by all the passions which attend disappointed love. Grief, rage, jealousy, and despair, made so cruel a war in her gentle bosom, that, unable either to express or conceal the strong emotions with which she was agitated, she gave way to a violent burst of tears” (p. 391).

Quite suddenly, the emotional temperature of the novel itself is raised. A rapid series of life-and-death adventures take place, so that for a time the characters could as well be in a romance as in a novel. Charlotte disguised as Arabella precipitates a duel between her brother and Sir George, who is seriously injured. Meanwhile, Arabella, in fear of four horsemen riding towards her, imitates the heroic Clelia who swam across the Tyber to save her honor (her source Adrien Thomas Perdu de Subligny, The Mock-Clelia: Being a Comical History of French Gallantries, and Novels, in Imitation of Don Quixote, 1678) and plunges into the Thames.

It has been argued that the reality of sexual danger for unprotected women of the time and the absolute necessity of intact chastity in an unmarried woman could justify what the learned Doctor describes as a product of “wild imagination(s)” (p. 412; Doody, 1989, p. xxi). It seems also that Lennox provides her novel with two endings, one a romance adventure (which is “real” because it occurs within a novel), and the other the renunciation of romance in favor of probability and contemporaneity. The Doctor has a difficult time dealing with an adversary whose intelligence and learning are a match for his own. He is hardest pressed when Arabella herself uses the theories of contemporary philosophers to argue against him. Locke, for example, is evoked when she points out to him that: “Universal negatives are seldom safe, and are least to be allowed when the disputes are about objects of sense; where one position cannot be inferred from another. That there is a castle, any man who has seen it may safely affirm. But you cannot, with equal reason, maintain that there is no castle, because you have not seen it” (p. 414).

When urged to prove that the romances are fictions and vicious, the Doctor must first counter a Shaftesburian claim for innate benevolence, which requires an equal motive be given for falsehood: “There is a love of truth in the human mind, if not naturally implanted, so easily obtained from reason and experience, that I should expect it universally to prevail where there is no strong temptation to deceit …” (p. 417), Arabella points out. The Doctor counters by invoking the patriarchal authority of Charlotte Lennox's real-life male mentors, Samuel Johnson and Samuel Richardson, who in the novel (specifically, Clarissa), have discovered a mode of fiction which does not injure truth and can convey “the most solid instructions” (p. 417). If both forms of writing are fictions, Arabella insists, why is one censured as absurd? And here, at last, the new rules for the novel, the supplanter of the romance, are described by the Doctor: “The only excellence of falsehood … is its resemblance to truth: as therefore any narrative is more liable to be confuted by its inconsistancy with known facts, it is at a greater distance from the perfection of fiction; for there can be no difficulty in framing a tale, if we are left at liberty to invent all history and nature for our own convenience” (p. 418).

What the Doctor fails to deal with here is the different use made of the creative imagination in two kinds of fiction. The romance story was often well known and its excellence thus measured according to the novelty of the manner in which it was told. The novel, on the other hand, as its name implies, was an invention which was validated by the unique conjunction of novelty and verisimilitude. Arabella has recognized the romances' emotional verisimilitude, a method of telling the truth of the heart and, therefore, in Shaftesburian terms, indicating moral truth as well. She trusts this rather than the claim to verisimilitude made on the basis of “known facts” partly because of the unreliability of language itself, its sometimes dubious ability to name the world truthfully, as so many of the novel's incidents have proved to her.

Thus it is, finally, that Arabella is only convinced by an appeal to her feelings, to the values of the heart which are the basis of the romances. When their emotional verisimilitude is demonstrated to be, if not false, then certainly dangerous, her resistance collapses at once. When the Doctor deconstructs the romance into its prevailing passions of revenge and love, points out that the price of women's love is very often the death of men, Arabella's consciousness of how nearly she may have lost Glanville in the duel overcomes her and she cries, “My heart yields to the force of truth” (p. 421). Better a live husband, after all, than a dead hero.

If this is a surrender to the needs of reality, there is triumph here, too. Arabella has got what her heart really desires, if not on the terms of the romance reversal of power relations between the sexes, then at least on terms very much better than the bald property transfer originally proposed for her. Her assertion of autonomy via the romances has ultimately excited the admiration of all the men she has encountered. Her uncle's words of praise “… if she had been a man, she would have made a great figure in parliament, and … her speeches might have come, perhaps, to be printed, in time …” (p. 348) constitutes one of Charlotte Lennox's metafictional jokes, but she has as author so exercised her authority that the masculinist “joke” has a different resonance for her readers. Arabella out-heroes all the men in the novel and her male-despised romances are, in postmodern fashion, given equal status in the competing forms of fiction contained within this self-consciously “made” novel. She may, as Jane Spencer (1986) has pointed out, be one of the eighteenth century's “reformed heroines,” but her author's exceptional awareness of the complexities of her narrative art saves her heroine from unconditional surrender to contemporary decorum (p. 140).

It seems extraordinary that such a remarkable novel as The Female Quixote should have been allowed almost to disappear from accounts of English literary history. It is a wonderfully entertaining record of a perfectly self-aware and deliberate transition from one kind of fictional writing to another, with the added complexity of aesthetic and moral value being firmly gendered. Modern feminist theorists could teach Charlotte Lennox little she didn't know about binary oppositions and their relative values. In seeing, at its very inception, that the novel was part of the masculine hegemony, she accurately, if unwittingly, foretold the subsequent historical construction of a masculine canon. The reclamation of a female writing tradition is the challenging task that still lies ahead, and Charlotte Lennox's sharp insights into the fiction-making process provide us with important tools of analysis as well as crucially gendered measurements of value.

References

Carr, Helen (1989). Introduction to From my guy to sci-fi: Genre and women's writing in the postmodern world. London: Pandora.

Doody, Margaret M. (1989). Introduction to The female quixote. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lennox, Charlotte (1986). The female quixote. London: Pandora. (Originally published in 1752.)

Spencer, Jane (1986). The rise of the woman novelist. From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.