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 BIOGRAPHY

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)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction: Reading, Writing, and Tilting at Windmills:
The Woman
Writer and the Female Quixote 1
1. The Model Quixote: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote 27
2. The Defiant Quixote: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Manuscript
Romance, and the Market for Mid-Century
Fiction 49
3. The Instructive Quixote: Maria Edgeworth, Affective Reading,
and the Limits of Didactic Writing 74
4. The Anonymous Quixote? Sarah Green, the Popular
Novel(ist),
and Posterity 104
5. The Engaged Quixote: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey 132
Epilogue: Screening Female Quixotism: Janeite Fangirls and the Persistence
of White, Heteropatriarchal Power 151
Notes 163
Bibliography 221
Index 000