Overview

Charlotte Lennox (c.1729-1804) was an eighteenth-century London author whose most celebrated novel, The Female Quixote (1752), is just one of eighteen works published over forty-three years. Her stories of independent women influenced Jane Austen, especially in her novels Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility. Susan Carlile's biography places Lennox in the context of intellectual and cultural history and focuses on her role as a central figure in the professionalization of authorship in England. Lennox participated in the most important literary and social discussions of her time, including debates concerning female authorship, the elevation of Shakespeare to national poet, and the role of periodicals as didactic texts for an increasingly literate population. Lennox also contributed to making Greek drama available for English-language audiences and pioneered the serialization of novels in magazines. Carlile's work is the first biographical treatment to consider a new cache of correspondence released in the 1970s and reveals how Lennox was part of an ambitious and progressive literary and social movement.

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9781442626232

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Reviews

""This biography…gives the fullest account of [Charlotte Lennox’s] life yet…and conducts readers through all of her major works. It arrives as a handsome, substantial volume, complete with full scholarly apparatus and a proselytizing zeal of application…It is undoubtedly a good thing that we have a new biography of Charlotte Lennox, and this is an industrious and likeable contender."" -- Min Wild * Times Literary Supplement, August 15, 2018 * ""This much-anticipated critical biography of the accomplished yet elusive eighteenth-century author Charlotte Lennox is well worth the wait."" -- Betty A. Schellenberg, Simon Fraser University * Women's Writing * ""There hasn’t been a new biography of Charlotte Lennox since 1967. Susan Carlile’s substantive, scrupulously researched Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind makes up for lost time."" -- Jayne Lewis * Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 * ""The wide range of Lennox’s writing requires Carlile to become an expert on an extraordinary variety of topics, from Sir Joshua Reynolds’s commission prices, to the political machinations between the Duke of Newcastle and the Duke of Bute in the early 1760s, to the 1774 copyright decision Donaldson v. Becket, to the biography of the Duchesse de La Vallière (a mistress of Louis XIV whose memoirs Lennox translated). This breadth of knowledge both fills in Lennox’s world and shows why Carlile considers her such a significant writer: one whose life and works illuminate many of the key topics of eighteenth-century studies. Charlotte Lennox will be an indispensable and unavoidable resource for any future research on this at once unique and representative figure."" -- Rachael Scarborough King, University of California, Santa Barbara, * <em>Early Modern Women</em>, Spring 2020 * ""Carlile gives a vivid picture of the London literary world during the mid to late eighteenth century. She notes that in an era that has been christened ‘The Age of the Emerging Female Author’, Lennox’s professional life bears witness to the greater visibility and acceptance of women writers, as well as to the shift from literary patronage to the growing power of the bookseller, the development of the novel as an important genre, the interrelationships between British and Continental as well as American literatures, and the reassessment of Shakespeare’s works."" -- Susan Kubica Howard, Duquesne University * <em>Eighteenth-Century Fiction</em> * ""Clearly a labor of love, Carlile’s meticulously detailed biography brings to life a woman whose commitment to her own personal autonomy and rejection of conventional thought and behavior make Lennox a woman impossible for readers not to respect, if not like or even also love."" -- Robin Runia * <i>1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries of the Early Modern Era, Volume 25</i> *

This biography...gives the fullest account of [Charlotte Lennox's] life yet...and conducts readers through all of her major works. It arrives as a handsome, substantial volume, complete with full scholarly apparatus and a proselytizing zeal of application...It is undoubtedly a good thing that we have a new biography of Charlotte Lennox, and this is an industrious and likeable contender. -- Min Wild * Times Literary Supplement, August 15, 2018 *

Author Information

Susan Carlile is a professor in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach. She has published on the literary marketplace of the 1750s and on the works of numerous English authors in the long eighteenth-century.

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