The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox - counting the pages, he was quite terrified at the number, and could not prevail upon himself to read them

Di at The little white attic is chasing Don Quixote through the 18th century, so she read, obviously, The Female Quixote (1852) by Charlotte Lennox.  I had not read it, so I trailed along.

An archetypal novelistic heroine, young Arabella has had her brain addled by novels:

From her earliest youth she had discovered a fondness for reading, which extremely delighted the marquis; he permitted her therefore the use of his library, in which, unfortunately for her, were great store of romances, and, what was still more unfortunate, not in the original French, but very bad translations.  (I.1, 7)

But, and this is key, the wrong novels, the colossal 17th century French romances (I wrote about them briefly here) and their English imitations that had an audience in England when for whatever reason the English were not producing such vast quantities of novels themselves.  The books were owned by Arabella’s mother, although more realistically they were the reading of her grandmother’s generation.  A nice touch in The Female Quixote, a touch of realism, is the mix of characters familiar with the old romances and the characters who have no idea what Arabella is talking about.

Because Arabella for some reason has concluded that these endless series of preposterous adventures, with kidnapped princesses and heroes slaughtering armies, just the kind of thing many of us still like today however different the precise conventions and rhetoric, are history, are true, and is thus believes that random strangers are going to kidnap her and that her suitors are literally dying of love for her.

That is pretty much the joke for the entire novel.  I thought it was an amusing conceit with a mildly funny development; Di found it “very, very funny”; Steven Moore, reading the book for The Novel: An Alternative History: 1600-1800 (2013), “laughed myself silly over it” and thought that Lennox “like a seasoned comedian milks [the romances] for every possible laugh” (773). I thought she left a lot of laughs on the table, so to speak.  But that’s two to one against me; maybe you would join the other two.

Moore, providing an example of a funny bit, picks the exact moment I found funniest, when Arabella tells the man pursuing her that he just needs to do the reading:

Arabella having ordered one of her women to bring Cleopatra, Cassandra, Clelia, and the Grand Cyrus from her library, Glanville no sooner saw the girl return, sinking under the weight of those voluminous romances, but he began to tremble at the apprehension of his cousin laying her commands upon him to read them; and repented of his complaisance, which exposed him to the cruel necessity of performing what to him appeared an Herculean labour, or else incurring her anger by his refusal. (I.12, 49)

Just a reminder that Cyrus, for example, in its original French edition, was ten volumes and 13,000 (!!!) pages long.  No idea what the bad English translation was like.  “[C]ounting the pages, he was quite terrified at the number, and could not prevail upon himself to read them  (I.12, 50).  Yeah, no kidding.  These books are very close to unread today, even in France, scholars of the literature of the period aside, and 13,000 pages is a lot even for them.

This suitor never reads more than a page of any of these books but he does prevent Arabella’s father from burning them, like the priest in Don Quixote does to the knightly romances.  A heroic feat as far as I am concerned.

The poor editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition spends most of her time tracking down each of the many references Arabella makes to the French romances, summarizing and often correcting them, so the endnotes are mostly tedious summaries of tedious episodes from tedious novels.  Luckily the clichés of the 17th century are not so far from the clichés of today, so it is easy to follow along without the details.

Many passages suggest that Arabella would be happy if she just had someone to talk to about her hobby, if she had a fandom, a forum on the internet and an annual convention where she could cosplay.  The “original fangirl,” Di calls her.  Lennox’s prose is minimally descriptive but does have passages describing the heroine’s fantastic costumes, her own designs.

At one point it seemed like the novel would end with Arabella’s mania infecting everyone around her, which might have been fun, but instead it all jerks to a halt when Samuel Johnson, disguised as a priest, convinces her that the French romances are un-Christian and that she should be reading the morally improving novels of Samuel Richardson instead.  I have read three of Richardson’s four novels; all three feature, prominently, in a contemporary, nominally realistic setting, the kidnapping of the heroine, so honestly I don’t think reading Richardson is going to work here.  One delusion will be replaced with another.  Reading novels is basically poison; we readers of novels all know that.