The Female Quixote 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 real power of females. While some dismissed Arabella as a
Northanger Abbey Irvine also notes that the first chapters in the novel satirize the novels of Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney, whom the novel ostensibly praises, as it does the Gothic novels. An early sign that Henry Tilney is the hero while John Thorpe is not can be seen in the former's liking to read books while the latter does not. The story begins with the narrator remarking that the heroine is not really a heroine, with the narrator saying Catherine was not especially clever, nor a great beauty, and good without being virtuous. The narrator goes to say the reader was