Excuse my dust: Charlotte Lennox
Charlotte Lennox (1730-1804)
Charlotte Lennox was the daughter of a Scottish army officer whose career meant that her childhood was spent abroad. She spent some years in America, which featured in her novels, thus earning her the title of ‘the first American novelist’. She returned to England and married a Scot, but her husband did not have income or a career, and Lennox turned to acting and writing for both money and pleasure, enjoying friendships with Samuel Johnson and David Garrick – and a reputation as a virago and bluestocking. Her best-known novel is The Female Quixote, in which the heroine approaches the real world through the prism of the romances she naively reads. Harriot Stuart is a fictionalized account of Charlotte Lennox’s own adventurous life.
Works include:
The life of Harriot Stuart, written by herself (1751) (ed. S. K. Howard (Madison, Wisc., 1995)
The Female Quixote, or, the Adventures of Arabella (1752) (ed. Sandra Shulman, Pandora,1986; ed. Amanda Gilroy, Penguin Classics, 2006)
Acknowledgement: 'This document /webpage/text was prepared by Helen Vincent of the National Library of Scotland for the Women's Forum workshop at NLS in 2010, and is re-used here by permission.