Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Charlotte Lennox
-
Standard Name: Lennox, Charlotte
Birth Name: Charlotte Ramsay
Married Name: Charlotte Lennox
Pseudonym: Sappho
Pseudonym: A Young Lady
Pseudonym: The Author of the Female Quixote
CL
wrote during the eighteenth century, in every genre: poetry, fiction, translation, drama, a periodical, and scholarship. Yet she found it hard to make a living. Current interest in The Female Quixote still tends unjustly to obscure the rest of her oeuvre.
Arriving in eighteenth-century London as one more young literary hopeful from the provinces, SJ
achieved such a name for himself as an arbiter of poetry, of morality (through his Rambler and other periodical essays and...
Occupation
David Garrick
This began his career as theatre manager. One of a manager's duties might be considered to be the putting on of new plays, to ensure the health of the theatre of the future, but familiar...
Literary responses
Frances Burney
Cecilia was well received. The Critical Review, for instance, gave it high praise in a notice following directly on that month's lead review (which was of Charles Burney's General History of Music, second...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins
EST
's brother Thomas Edlyne
included a poem in praise of The Victim of Fancy in their joint volume in 1797.
Tomlins, Elizabeth Sophia, and Sir Thomas Edwyne Tomlins. Tributes of Affection. Longman and Dilly.
77
The Gentleman's Magazinecalled this novel, when it was published, a worthy successor...
Literary responses
Phebe Gibbes
The notice in the Critical Review opened condescendingly. Guessing that the author was female, it warned its readers: It seldom happens that ladies equal in genius to Lennox
, Brooke
s, and Scott
, figure...
The title-page promises embellishment with characters and anecdotes of well-known persons,
Hatton, Ann. Chronicles of an Illustrious House. Minerva.
title-page
and offers a Latin quotation about man being either a god or a wolf, and a French one on mastering the passions. Volumes...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Hays
Among the book's contents are poems and fiction (including dream visions and an Oriental tale. Titles like Cleora, or the Misery Attending Unsuitable Connections and Josepha, or pernicious Effects of early Indulgence foreground Hays's didactic...
Intertextuality and Influence
Madeleine de Scudéry
MS
was highly influential for women writers in English. Many of the women who wrote during the eighteenth century had grown up on her romances. Charlotte Lennox
may appear to be stabbing MS
in the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Eliza Haywood
A more recent generation of feminist scholars has succeeded in locating EH
in the developing tradition of women's fiction. Critic Mary Anne Schofield
has argued that her heroines are feisty feminists. Paula Backscheider
points out...
Intertextuality and Influence
Tabitha Tenney
With Charlotte Lennox
's The Female Quixote as starting-point, this story follows a novel-reading heroine whose response to events and people in actual life is distorted by what she reads. It seems quite likely that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maria Edgeworth
Angelina, generally treated as a descendant of Charlotte Lennox
's Female Quixote, shows just how permeable is the boundary between ME
's juvenile and adult fiction. It warns against influence from the wrong...
Intertextuality and Influence
Tabitha Tenney
Neither the Cumberland episode, nor her father's death, nor her own serious illness brought on by grief, can change Dorcasina. She next fancies that a new servant, John Brown, is a lover in disguise. (The...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriette Wilson
As a girl HW
apparently cherished the ambition that one day she would write the female Gil Blas much as Charlotte Lennox
had written The Female Quixote.
Wilson, Frances. The Courtesan’s Revenge. Faber.
17
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Fielding
Other women novelists found this a fertile text. Critic Susan Catto
suggested that the social ignorance of Lennox
's Arabella owes something to that of Ophelia. She also noted that at a ball the heroine...