The Female Quixote late to the printing press, resulting in the typeset errors. The Female Quixote The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Arabella is a novel written by Charlotte Lennox imitating and parodying the ideas of Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote". Published in 1752, two years after she wrote her first novel, "The Life of Harriot Stuart", it was her best-known and most-celebrated work. It was approved by both Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, applauded by Samuel Johnson, and used as a model by Jane Austen for "Northanger Abbey". It has been called a burlesque, "satirical harlequinade", and a depiction of the
Northanger Abbey those who read novels. It is also made clear in this text that those who are considered "good" and well-educated read novels, such as Henry and Eleanor Tilney. John Thorpe, for example, who does not read novels, is the cad of the text. Furthermore, there is a distinction made between Catherine's imagination and childishness that encourages her fantasy of a murderous General Tilney, rather than it being a direct fault of the novel genre. "Northanger Abbey" is fundamentally a parody of Gothic fiction. Austen turns the conventions of eighteenth-century novels on their head, by making her heroine a plain and