Quixotic Authority: The Female Quixote and the Woman Writer, Lennox to Austen

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...