Quixotic Authority: The Female Quixote and the Woman Writer, Lennox to Austen

Female quixotes, the fangirls of their time, proliferated in the eighteenth century. Quixotic Authority explores the female quixote trope within novels and in the professional lives of British women writers from Charlotte Lennox and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Maria Edgeworth, Sarah Green, and Jane Austen to show how deeply absorbed reading was inextricable from and essential to women's writing and cultural commentary at this time.