Charlotte Lennox

English novelist and scholar

• Born: c. 1729
• Birthplace: Probably Gibraltar
• Died: January 4, 1804
• Place of death: Westminster, England

Lennox’s novels, which could be described as sentimentally romantic, include her second novel, The Female Quixote, which enjoyed both popular and critical acclaim in its own day and endures as one of the period’s better fictional works. Lennox was the first to examine Shakespeare’s use of his sources in her work of criticism, and her French translations introduced Anglophones to significant French works of the period.

Early Life

The details of Charlotte Lennox’s early life are uncertain, in part because she distorted her biography in appealing to the Royal Literary Fund. To win greater sympathy, she claimed to be about ten years older than she was, and she claimed that her father had been a colonel instead of an infantry captain and then claimed he was lieutenant-governor of New York. Also to blame for the ambiguity surrounding her life is the desire of readers to turn her first novel, The Life of Harriot Stuart (1750), into fictionalized autobiography.

Charlotte apparently was born about 1729, probably in Gibraltar, where her father, James Ramsay, was serving in an infantry regiment. In late 1738, Ramsay was posted to Albany, New York, where Charlotte absorbed details of the landscape and its indigenous peoples that would figure in her first and last novels. When her father died in 1743, Charlotte returned to England without her mother, Catherine Tisdale Ramsay. Catherine died in America in 1765.

In London, Lennox, like her heroine Harriot Stuart, was befriended by two aristocratic women, Lady Isabella Finch and her sister, the countess of Rockingham. Lennox dedicated her first book, Poems on Several Occasions (1747), to Lady Isabella, but The Life of Harriot Stuart satirizes Lady Cecelia (a thinly disguised version of Lady Isabella), indicating that Lennox was disappointed in her expectations of her patron.

A month before the appearance of Lennox’s book of poems, she married Alexander Lennox (October 6, 1747). Her husband was to prove a financial and emotional drain on Charlotte. His chief contributions to her life consisted of providing the model for the disreputable husband in Lennox’s last novel, Euphemia (1790) and of introducing her to Samuel Johnson. (Alexander had worked for a time with Johnson’s printer, William Strahan.) Johnson proved to be Lennox’s greatest supporter, and he introduced her to other important London literary figures, including the novelist and printer Samuel Richardson, the publisher Andrew Millar, and John Boyle, the earl of Orrery. Lennox tried unsuccessfully to earn a living as an actor; Horace Walpole described her as “deplorable,” in a letter to George Montagu (1748). Lennox then turned to writing to earn a living.

Life’s Work

In 1750, Charlotte Lennox published a quasi-epistolary novel called The Life of Harriot Stuart, Written by Herself. The book received mostly favorable reviews, though the Monthly Review (December, 1750) noted a lack of interesting characters or memorable events. Lennox’s next book and by far her best was The Female Quixote: Or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752). The heroine Arabella devours seventeenth century French romances, and her reading has affected her perception of reality. Thus, she believes an “under-gardener” to be a prince in disguise and a prostitute to be a damsel in distress. She frequently thinks she is about to be ravished. Late in the novel, fleeing from imagined pursuers, she leaps into the Thames River and nearly dies. During her convalescence, a minister disabuses her of her romantic notions, and she later marries her long-suffering cousin.

The chapter with the minister shows Johnson’s influence and may have been written by him. Johnson and Richardson persuaded Millar to publish the book, after Johnson and novelist Henry Fielding touted the book in their reviews. The novel went through multiple editions in English and was translated into German (1754), French (1773), and Spanish (1808). George Colman’s comedy Polly Honeycombe (1760) is based on Lennox’s novel. Jane Austen read the book at least twice and used it as a model for Northanger Abbey (1818).

In 1753, Lennox published Shakespear Illustrated. The project was suggested by Johnson, who was preparing to edit the playwright’s works and intended to discuss Shakespeare’s debts to his sources. Lennox thus could help him and herself. Lennox already knew French; to deal with Italian works she studied the language with Giuseppe Baretti, whom she then introduced to Johnson. The two men became lifelong friends. In her three volumes, Lennox presents the sources of twenty-two plays, the first such study of the subject. Lennox’s neoclassical views led her to condemn Shakespeare’s adaptations. Of Measure for Measure, she wrote, “What he has altered from Cinthio, is altered greatly for the worse.” Elsewhere she stated that, “Wherever Shakespeare has altered or invented, his Winter’s Tale is greatly inferior to the old paltry Story that furnished him with the Subject of it.” She also objected to Shakespeare’s treatment of his heroines, blaming him for making them weak and silly.

Throughout her life Lennox needed money. In the 1750’s she undertook a series of translations from the French. She also found time to write another novel, The History of Henrietta (1758), based on Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux’s La vie de Marianne (1731-1741). The second edition of The History of Henrietta (1761) is dedicated to the duchess of Newcastle, who had provided financial assistance when the struggling author was ill in 1760. The novel shows that for women, wealth is more important than virtue, beauty, and birth in securing a good marriage.

In the 1760’s, Lennox launched the short-lived magazine The Lady’s Museum (March, 1760-January, 1761), in which she serialized her next novel, published separately as Sophia (1762). The serious heroine of the novel, Sophia, and her worldly sister, Harriot, anticipate Elinor and Marianne in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811). To eke out a living, Lennox served as governess to the daughters of Saunders Welch, a London police magistrate, and, in 1765, Lennox gave birth to a daughter, Harriot Holles Lennox (d. 1783 or 1784). In 1771, she had a son named George Louis.

Lennox was unable to have her dramatic pastoral Philander (1757) staged, and The Sister (1769), based on The History of Henrietta, closed after just one performance. She enjoyed more success with Old City Manners (1775), which she adapted from Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston’s Eastward Hoe! (1605) at the urging of David Garrick, who produced her comedy at his Drury Lane Theatre in London on November 9, 1775. The play was performed six times that month and once more in January, 1776.

Lennox’s last novel, Euphemia, appeared in 1790. Like Harriot Stuart, this work draws on Lennox’s years in New York and incorporates her unhappy experiences with her husband, from whom she had separated sometime after 1782. Lennox spent her last years in poverty, dependent on grants from the Royal Literary Society (established in 1790. She died in Dean’s Yard, Westminster, on January 4, 1804, and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Significance

Charlotte Lennox’s reputation rests on The Female Quixote, though her Shakespear Illustrated also is an important landmark in the study of Shakespeare’s use of his sources. Her greatest significance as a writer lies in her influence on her successors, especially Jane Austen, who admired Lennox’s writings. Feminist critics of the late twentieth century and the twenty-first century find in Lennox’s work an exploration of the difficulties women faced in a patriarchal society. For example, The Female Quixote’s Arabella is led astray by her faulty education, and The History of Henrietta examines the plight of a woman without money.

Lennox’s life reveals the same difficulties. Although aristocratic patronage for writers was fading in the late eighteenth century, it was being supplanted by another kind of patronage: support from private individuals. Johnson, Richardson, and Fielding helped Lennox get published, and Garrick and Colman tried to promote her plays. Without their assistance, Lennox would not have been noticed and thereby would not have enjoyed any success. Also, the writing life in the eighteenth century, and into the nineteenth century, remained more difficult for women than for men. Lennox’s younger contemporary, Charlotte Smith, also struggled to earn a living by her pen, and Austen’s six novels combined earned her less than œ200.

Bibliography

Berg, Temma F. “Getting the Mother’s Story Right: Charlotte Lennox and the New World.” Papers on Language and Literature 32 (Fall, 1996): 369-398. Examines how women are presented in Lennox’s two “American” novels (Harriot Stuart and Euphemia).

Hanley, Brian. “Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Richardson, and the Reception of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote.” ANQ 13 (Summer, 2000): 27-32. Discusses how Fielding, Johnson, and Richardson promoted the publication and then sale of Lennox’s most popular novel.

Howard, Susan Kubica, ed. The Life of Harriot Stuart, Written by Herself. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995. Howard’s introduction supplements and corrects earlier biographical studies. It also provides a good critical introduction to Lennox’s novel.

Small, Miriam Rossiter. Charlotte Ramsay Lennox: An Eighteenth Century Lady of Letters. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1935. Still the standard biography, though some information is out of date. Includes good discussions of Lennox’s writings.

Spender, Dale. Mothers of the Novel: One Hundred Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen. London: Pandora, 1986. Offers a feminist perspective on Lennox’s career.