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Quixotic Authority
The Female Quixote and the Woman Writer, Lennox to Austen
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2026
About this book
Quixotic Authority reveals how deeply absorbed reading was inextricable from and essential to British women's professional writing and cultural commentary from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. The trope of quixotism, what we might today call "fangirling," had distinctly gendered implications, as the female quixote was almost exclusively associated with uncritical, overly absorptive novel reading, and often portrayed as a self-centered, deluded, ill-educated home-wrecker who must be reformed or punished. But what do we make of the fact that women wrote most of the depictions of female quixotes in novels of this period? Jodi Wyett shows that authors such as Charlotte Lennox and Jane Austen wrote quixote narratives to assert their own professional cachet as well as validate the passion and intelligence of women novel readers. Harnessing the power of the genre, they debunked proscriptive contemporary discourse denigrating both women and the novel. This book redefines the female quixote as a fierce fangirl both modeled in fiction and embodied by her creators.
Author / Editor information
JODI L. WYETT is Professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. She has published numerous book chapters, as well as articles in such journals as Aphra Behn Online, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, on subjects such as Jane Austen, Frances Brooke, and female quixotism.
Reviews
“Jodi Wyett’s Quixotic Authority sheds exciting new light on the familiar figure of the eighteenth-century female quixote. Her elegant writing compellingly brings these much-maligned women to life, displaying all the humor and cleverness of the quixotic novels she analyzes. Wyett’s close readings explore these works as appealing popular fictions and, even more importantly, as social commentaries with serious points to make about gender and authorship.”
— Hannah Doherty Hudson, author of Romantic Fiction and Literary Excess in the Minerva Press Era (2023)"In this beautifully and expansively written book, Wyett details how quixotism freed major players in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century novel industry who faced stultifying gender and racial expectations. In her hands, quixotism is no longer about mindless engagement in overly enthusiastic fan culture, but it is a powerful tool to reveal the constructedness of reality and enact radical empathy not only centuries ago, but today. From Janeite Fangirls to Bridgerton, you will never dismiss a Quixote again."— Susan Carlile, author of Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind (2018)
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Acknowledgments
ix -
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Introduction: Reading, Writing, and Tilting at Windmills: The Woman Writer and the Female Quixote
1 -
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1. The Model Quixote: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote
27 -
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2. The Defiant Quixote: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Manuscript Romance, and the Market for Mid- Century Fiction
49 -
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3. The Instructive Quixote: Maria Edgeworth, Affective Reading, and the Limits of Didactic Writing
74 -
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4. The Anonymous Quixote? Sarah Green, the Popular Novel(ist), and Posterity
104 -
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5. The Engaged Quixote: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey
132 -
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Epilogue: Screening Female Quixotism: Janeite Fangirls and the Persistence of White, Heteropatriarchal Power
151 -
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Notes
163 -
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Bibliography
221 -
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Index
243 -
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About the Author
253
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
January 13, 2026
eBook ISBN:
9781644534144
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781644534144
Keywords for this book
Eighteenth-Century Studies; eighteenth-century literature; eighteenth-century; British literature; British fiction; authorship; history of the novel; Women’s Studies; women authors; quixotism; The Female Quixote; Jane Austen; quixotes; eighteenth-century; female reading; imagination; Tristram Shandy; Female Quixote; Charlotte Lennox; Laurence Sterne; Elizabeth Hamilton; Richard Graves; George Colman; Polly Honeycombe; Spiritual Quixote; Memoirs of Modern Philosophers; impression; imprint; Charlotte Lennox; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; Maria Edgeworth; Sarah Green; fan girls; quixotes; female reading; imagination; Tristram Shandy; Female Quixote; Laurence Sterne; Elizabeth Hamilton; Richard Graves; George Colman; Polly Honeycombe; Spiritual Quixote; Memoirs of Modern Philosophers; impression; imprint; women novelists; 18th-century British literature; absorptive reading; fangirl trope; gender and authorship; women readers; novel reading; professional women writers; literary authority; gendered reading practices; authorial cachet; fiction and identity; literary market; historical adaptations; feminist literary criticism; women in publishing; reading and reform; literary trope; deluded heroine; heteropatriarchal norms; women’s imagination; gendered power dynamics; literary backlash; novelistic representation; passionate reader; cultural commentary; fangirling; women’s professional writing; empowerment; Quixotic Authority; Early Modern Feminisms; The Female Quixote and the Woman Writer; Lennox to Austen
Audience(s) for this book
For universities and colleges of further and higher education
