Abstract
ABSTRACT Charlotte Lennox's novel The Female Quixote is the story of a young aristocrat cured of the disease of romance reading and transformed into the perfect wife. More than one recent feminist critic characterizes the novel as Lennox's rebellion against eighteenth‐century patriarchal structures. Although the novel displays a certain degree of moral ambiguity and genre undecidability, to read the cure as a flaw or aberration is to misread Lennox's purpose. Lennox needed Arabella's cure, not only for her novel and its female readers, but for herself. The negative critical and commercial reception of Lennox's first publications made her fear the literary market. Instead of retreating, she relied on her male mentors to ensure that The Female Quixote would be acceptable and successful. With Arabella's cure, Lennox acknowledged that the freedoms available to men were dangerous for women. To survive, she became a “woman writer” according to her society's specifications.
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