The Female Quixote: Or the Adventures of Arabella

For aficionados' of Jane Austin, a must read. She had some of her favorite book and this was one of them. Bool was in perfect shape except the stamping on the sides of the boo as being discarded. I was from the Texas A&M University Library. Stamped and labels everywhere.

The romance was the major form of literature from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Romances were epic tales full of heroism, adventure and chivalry, sometimes involving gods or legendary figures. After the Renaissance came a slow transition to shorter, less epic and less fantastic forms of literature to what we now appreciate as the "novel". By the mid-1700s, when Charlotte Lennox wrote The Female Quixote, romances were considered by many as dangerous. With a comparatively large literate population and books becoming easier to mass produce, romances lead credulous readers to think that the dream worlds of heroism and fantasy were true. Or so some thought. The Female Quixote is the story of Arabella who has lived in seclusion all her life. With only her recluse father and a mountain of old romances as companions, Arabella grows up thinking that the world of her books is the world that she lives in. All is fine and good in her quiet abode until her uncle and cousins arrive and she is thrown into society. You can hardly imagine the trouble she gets into. Any man riding a horse is a probable ravisher. Any gardener with a literate accent is a man in disguise intending to carry her away. A small argument between two young men will no doubt turn into a bloody duel over the affections of a lady. The story is bit sluggish at times, but always full of strange and funny episodes. Particularly funny is the history of Sir George, one of Arabella's many admirers. He recounts his life story (or what he wants Arabella to believe it is), complete with a dethroned Prince, bloody duels, imprisonment and multiple damsels in distress. The Female Quixote is an amusing read that perhaps has applications to modern living. Has anyone ever told you that too much television will rot your brain? Or that trashy romance novels will give you wrong notions of relationships? Sit up and take note.

I loved reading this book. The heroine needed a butt whupping, really, that's what it boils down to. She had everything and was letting it go for her 2000 year old romance book collection. Finally, a Countess (who then had to bow out) and also a Reverend Doctor gave her a talking to and told her no more jumping into the river just because a man a mile away was riding a horse toward her! After that incident she had to finally see sense and apparently her eyes were also opened to the noble young man who was in love with her the whole time and took a whole lot of abuse from her. The ending was a bit abrupt but the flow and the feel of the story were way ahead of Jane Austen and Ann Radcliffe. And Lennox had subtle and imaginative incidents of bitchery and cunning worked into the story too. And a sword fight. Hooray for Charlotte Lennox, so sorry that she died without a penny, but her Arabella will live in infamy (the Female Coyote).

Charlotte Lennox's heroine, raised in complete seclusion from the world by her misanthropic father, grows up believing that romances (of the chivalric kind already satirized by Cervantes more than a century before in the original Don Quixote)are true histories and that the extravagant behavior of the knights and heroes in such texts is the model for modern (18th century)men. Poor Arabella is doomed to be ridiculous! Her world of romance never was and never will be. But although she makes the most absurd mistakes, she is intelligent and strangely wise much of the time: she ignores fashion, she believes in complete honesty and fidelity, she rejects all accomodations to practical, but base, worldly wisdom. She constructs a world of her own in which women, who in the real world were quite helpless and treated as chattel, hold real power.It is perhaps unfortunate that Lennox was a bit too much under the influence of Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson, both great writers but quite conservative in their views about women and their place in society (firmly under the power of men). The ending of the novel seems rushed and sad. Poor Arabella, so delightfully original throughout most of the novel, is "reformed"--as one of my friends said after reading it, and so "she becomes completely ordinary." If it weren't for the ending, the book would get five stars.

the first time i saw christ was on the way to the golden lucky restaurant, hokitika's best takeaways. i wasn't looking for christ - i was looking for norman mailer. they had no copies of ancient evenings at the hokitika 18th century women's writing book exchange, but they had eight copies of the female quixote, arranged in alphabetical order. i bought four, sent one to jenny shipley, one to j w wray and kept two for myself. one was a first edition, inscribed in the author's own hand. i was spellbound as i read of arabella who, having read too many romantic novels (a brilliant parable of modern american life) embarks on an episode of whimsical whitebaiting, wading through deep west-coast streams, flanked by a large burly man called keri and flicking the tops off monteiths bottles with one knuckle. this is the best fictional work about west coast whitebaiting. period.