Female Quixote Vol. 1

Arabella, a young and wealthy heiress, has withdrawn from society after devouring one too many French romances. She has convinced herself she is a beautiful, all-powerful heroine capable of killing with a single glance, and that every gentleman who encounters her must become a lovesick suitor willing to undergo any trial she demands. When the sensible Mr. Glanville arrives to cure her of her fantastical notions, the stage is set for a delicious collision between romance-addled fantasy and stubbornly mundane reality. Charlotte Lennox performs a daring inversion of Cervantes: where Don Quixote mistakes himself for a knight-errant, Arabella mistakes herself for the idealized heroine of a romance, and the satire cuts both ways. Lennox, a contemporary of Samuel Johnson, skewers the absurdities of popular fiction while quietly interrogating the limited imaginative lives available to women of her era. The comedy remains sharp, the social commentary surprisingly modern, and Arabella herself strangely sympathetic, a woman whose only crime was taking novels seriously.