Narratives and Counter-Narratives —Quixotic Hermeneutics in Eighteenth-Century England: Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote

At the time of publication, The Female Quixote (1752) by Charlotte Lennox was received on the terms announced by its title: as a Cervantine, parodic novel. Modern critics read it either as a reflection of the historical forces that restricted writers at that time, or as a failed Cervantine novel. Read as a true inheritor of Cervantine narrative strategies, The Female Quixote is a "metarepresentation" that highlights the creative agency of its source, inviting readers to a hermeneutic game. In contrast to modern accounts of the novel that focus on the historical author and her relationship with Samuel Johnson, to whom parts of the novel have been attributed, I argue that the novel parodies Johnson's style and literary norms. Through an investigation of the novel's interpretive history, the essay demonstrate that a novel's point, if a metafictive one, may be lost if we enter through a historical anteroom of little relevance to its concern.