Female Quixote topics:

You notice the style

Novel is comic

It imitates Cervantes

Books, gender, and authority

Isolation (literary, spatial, mental)

Echoes Pope’s Belinda in Rape of the Lock

Main character is irritating and self-absorbed

Concern with social norms

Lack of focus on religion

Novel explores female desire

Working hypotheses:

The novel [dramatizes interpretation] or [is about the effect of literature and form on the reader.] This book focuses directly on reading, because Lennox seeks to destabilize the issue of authority in it, and to represent that in her main character. Arabella’s instability and struggle for authority is ultimately a function of her reading, her isolation, and her sex.

Although this novel has conspicuously little to say directly about religion, Arabella’s desire to make her life conform to the spirit of one text or canon is in fact an allegory of the way lives had been guided by the Bible and religious texts generally; the role of romance has supplanted traditional roles of religion in her reading experience.