The Female Quixote

A romantic dreamer, a sceptical world and the perilous power of books

Volume I of a two-volume edition

First published in 1752, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Arabella is one of the great comic novels of the eighteenth century. In Volume I of this restored two-volume edition, Arabella, the daughter of a marquess, forms her understanding of life and love from the heroic romances of seventeenth-century France. Convinced that noble suitors, desperate rivalries, and perilous adventures await her, she moves through the modern world guided by the logic of an earlier age, leaving confusion and fascination in her wake.

Celebrated by Samuel Johnson and admired by Henry Fielding, Lennox’s novel is far more than a lively parody. It is a subtle and perceptive exploration of how reading shapes imagination, expectation, and desire, and of the freedoms and constraints placed upon women in eighteenth-century society. Arabella emerges as one of the most original heroines in English fiction: intellectually formidable, morally serious, and magnificently out of step with her time.

This P-Wave Classics edition restores the novel in its original form, presenting a carefully established text based on the 1752 edition, with modernised spelling for clarity. Volume I includes a new introduction, an essay on The World of French Romance, and a detailed Glossary of the Romance World, offering readers a rich guide to the literary universe that shaped Arabella’s mind.

Edited with notes and an introduction by L.A. Davenport.