Female Quixotism Refashioned: Northanger Abbey , the Engaged Reader, and the Woman Writer

Abstract

Though there are certainly many examples of gently parodied male quixotes in eighteenth-century letters and life, from Henry Fielding's Parson Adams to Horace Walpole's depiction of himself as a reader, the figure of the female quixote seems almost exclusively associated with uncritical, overly absorptive novel reading. 1 A 1798 essay, "On the Reading of Novels," in The Monthly Visitor and Pocket Companion sums up contemporary anti-novel discourse with its contention that most novels "have a tendency to mislead the mind, to enfeeble the heart, to represent nature in improper colours, to excite, rather than to suppress, in the young and ardent, romantic notions of love, and to lead the unwary amidst the winding mazes of intrigue, and the flowery fields of dissipation." Furthermore, "females, in general, are the most inclined to peruse them, and from a fatal inattention to their education, they are the most likely to fall victims to their baneful insinuations." 2 Such anti-novel discourse was so widespread by the end of the eighteenth century as to be a cliché.Yet women wrote most of the female quixote characters in later eighteenthand early nineteenth-century novels. At this time when novels were considered a primarily feminized phenomenon, however problematically, women writers had important stakes in legitimating the act of absorptive reading, the reading of novels, and women's reading in general. Professional writers keen to have their books read, whether for fame, profit, or both, were invested in the kind of reader who could both lose herself in the text and distance herself from the intellectual incapacity such absorbed reading purportedly caused. Examining the deployment of the female quixote as a significant mark of literary professionalism, I argue that women who were avowed readers of prose fiction and professional novelists created complex quixotic fictions in recognition of the novel's power. The figure of the female quixote proved particularly poignant

The quixotic eighteenth century

“…This situation might stem from the contextualising granularity generally expected within contemporary historicist-oriented scholarship, but whatever the cause, much work on quixotic texts, including recent work on eighteenth-century quixotes, is attentive to the way quixotism is deployed by a specific author or within a specific context. For instance, Jodi Wyett's valuable work examines how quixotism is used by women writers in eighteenth-century Britain to assert their authority (Wyett, 2015a(Wyett, , 2015b.…”