The Female Quixote Or The Adventures Of Arabella
Charlotte Lennox
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Jan. 8, 2009)
Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, or The Adventures of Arabella is part imitation of and part commentary on Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote. Written in the mid-eighteenth century, among a rash of Cervantes imitations, Lennox's novel was by far the most popular and enduring of its kind. Simultaneously a critique of Cervantes' idealism and an appreciation of his humor, his irony, and his formal achievements, the novel has also been read as a feminist commentary on the consequences of women's estrangement from male society.The novel explores various dichotomies and oppositions: realism and idealism, sanity and hysteria, the romance and the novel, female and male, and fiction and history, among others.