Charlotte Lennox (c.1729-1804) was an eighteenth-century London author whose most celebrated novel, The Female Quixote (1752), is just one of eighteen works published over forty-three years. Her stories of independent women influenced Jane Austen, especially in her novels Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility.
Susan Carlile’s biography places Lennox in the context of intellectual and cultural history and focuses on her role as a central figure in the professionalization of authorship in England. Lennox participated in the most important literary and social discussions of her time, including debates concerning female authorship, the elevation of Shakespeare to national poet, and the role of periodicals as didactic texts for an increasingly literate population. Lennox also contributed to making Greek drama available for English-language audiences and pioneered the serialization of novels in magazines. Carlile’s work is the first biographical treatment to consider a new cache of correspondence released in the 1970s and reveals how Lennox was part of an ambitious and progressive literary and social movement.
Susan Carlile is a professor in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach. She has published on the literary marketplace of the 1750s and on the works of numerous English authors in the long eighteenth-century.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction
The American
1. New World Thinking
2. An English Sappho
3. Making a Trade of Her Wit
4. Uniting the Laudable Affections of the Mind
The Professional
5. Debating “Genius”
6. Prospering in a Patronizing Profession
7. “The Same Darling End…By Different Means”
8. Recasting a Career
The Celebrity
9. “The Law of Custom”…or of “Fools”?
10. “Work Upon That Now!”
11. Friendship, Marriage, and Motherhood
12. “A Pen that Conferred Immortality”
Lennox’s Afterlife
Notes
Publications, Editions, and Reprints
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
Manushag Powell
"Susan Carlile has proven herself to be the world's foremost living expert on Charlotte Lennox. Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind represents a watershed moment in Lennox studies and in studies of the eighteenth-century culture more broadly. Drastically reshaping the dominant understanding of just what kind of writer Lennox actually was, Carlile highlights Lennox's translations and critical work, moving them to the center of Lennox's story."
Devoney Looser
"Susan Carlile's Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind describes in vivid detail a skeptical, ambitious, and spiky eighteenth-century woman of genius. Carlile provides a fascinating, original account of Lennox, who grew up in America, found herself alone as a teen in England, married a ne'er-do-well, and raised challenging children, all the while living, writing, and publishing in near poverty. This is the literary biography of the pioneering author of The Female Quixote that many of us have longed for."
Isobel Grundy
"Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind is a valuable autobiography of a major figure, and brings together fascinating new material to construct a new view of professional authorship in the mid- and late eighteenth century, all from the unusual angle of the female writer."
