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Essay on
The Female Quixote by Lennox
This parody Cervantes' technique is the best work of Charlotte Lennox. She was born in New York, offspring of a British Colonel, James Ramsey, who was a director of the colony. She grew up in Albany, New York, until age 15 when she was sent to live with an aunt in England, whom she found to be insane. Her father died soon after, and she tried to make a living as a performer. When this failed, she bowed to writing and was befriended by Samuel Johnson, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. In 1747, she married Alexander Lennox, and also published her Poems on Several Occasions. Her sentimental novels Female Quixote (1752), and History of Henrietta (1758) were popular with women in her days. She also published an historical account of Shakespeare's source material in Shakespeare Illustrated (1754). Lennox died in London on January 4, 1804 at the age of 84.
The book took interpretation public by squall a 2nd edition in 3 months and sustained to be in print until 1820. The novel ridicules French romances but is much more than a parody. The plot of the story goes as such that Arabella's father is a baron who is banished from court and moves to a remote castle where he marries a young wife who later dies. She leaves her store of French romances and Arabella, after discovering them in her father's library, reads them and takes them to be real histories. She discovers after her father dies that she must marry her cousin Glanville or lose a third of her land but she refuses to.
She interpret her whole humankind in stipulations of the romances, which creates much of the humor of the novel for example, when she sees a gardener she thinks he must be a prince in disguise who has designs on her whereas he really is developing to steal a fish from the pond.....
