A Portrait of Quixote as A Young Woman: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote

Among literary genres, the novel is perhaps the one most suitable for discussion in connection with the idea of metamorphosis. As well as the rise of the novel, another closely-related fundamental 'metamorphosis' took place in the field of letters during the eighteenth century: the rise of the woman writer. By choosing a 'common' woman as their heroine and making her the focus of their narration, women novelists were instigating a fundamental shift from everyday reality, in which the feminine role was relegated to a 'behind-the-scenes' existence. Charlotte Lennox's novel, The Female Quixote, tells the story of a young woman, Arabella, who is brought up in complete isolation in the country, nourishing her imagination on seventeenth-century French romances. While superficially describing the redemption of a girl from her dangerous romantic dreams, The Female Quixote seems in fact to propose a salutary escape into a fantastic realm, a sort of upside-down world where the subversion of roles and rules is possible.