The Quixotic Mother, the Female Author, and Mary Charlton's Rosella

Abstract

To be a quixote is to be birthed by novels. In late eighteenth-century Britain, longstanding but newly urgent concerns around literary (re)production, the novel, female authorship, and gender roles converge within the fraught figure of the quixote who is also a mother. Focusing on quixotic mothers in general—and Mary Charlton's understudied novel Rosella, or Modern Occurrences (Minerva Press, 1799) in particular—this essay asserts that metaphors of authorship as biological maternity structure late eighteenth-century quixotic narratives' treatment of women's writing and the novel. Through creating a character who simultaneously embodies female authorship, quixotism, and maternity, Charlton suggests how late eighteenth-century quixotic figures provide a means for writers to explore, destabilize, and affirm models of maternal and authorial monstrosity.