The Female Quixote, Charlotte Lennox
The Female Quixote, Charlotte Lennox
List: $18.00 | Sale: $12.60
Club: $9.00

The Female Quixote
Penguin Classics

Author: Charlotte Lennox

Narrator: Donna Banya, Kristin Atherton

Unabridged: 16 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/03/2020

Categories: Fiction, Classic


Synopsis

Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Donna Banya, who has appeared on stage in Fairview at the Young Vic and in Macbeth and Romeo & Juliet with the RSC. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Amanda Gilroy.

Beautiful and independent, Arabella has been brought up in rural seclusion by her widowed father. Devoted to reading French romances, the sheltered young woman imagines all sorts of misadventures that can befall a heroine such as herself. As she makes forays into fashionable society in Bath and London, many scrapes and mortifications ensue - all men seem like predators wishing to ravish her, she mistakes a cross-dressing prostitute for a distressed gentlewoman, and she risks her life by throwing herself into the Thames to avoid a potential seducer. Can Arabella be cured of her romantic delusions? An immediate success when it first appeared in 1752, The Female Quixote is a wonderfully high-spirited parody of the style of Cervantes, and a telling and comic depiction of eighteenth-century English society.

(P) Penguin Audio 2020

Reviews

Goodreads review by Henry on June 17, 2024

The beautiful, delectable, bright Arabella 17, has it all , a fabulously wealthy nobleman father, once a prominent man in the king's court, the nameless Marquis, having fled London , now living in a remote castle in rural eighteenth century England. The daughter's servants take care of every need or......more

Goodreads review by Mieneke on November 20, 2010

Let me be honest; The Female Quixote was a huge struggle to get through. Only the fact that I'd decided that I was going to finish this book and review it, kept me from putting it away. Frustratingly, this wasn't because the story as such was bad or the writing was shoddy, it was because Lennox's pr......more

Goodreads review by Katie on August 01, 2025

Huge fun.......more

Goodreads review by DC on July 16, 2011

Hah, what a lovely little book this is. What a lovely, deliciously ridiculous book this is. Seriously, it's a romp. From the title itself, you can discern that it involves some kind of delusional mis-adventurer. Quite right, as the story revolves around the life-story of the Lady Arabella, who is as......more

Having just finished a group read of Charlotte Lenox’s The Female Quixote, the consensus opinion was that this was a lost opportunity. The conceit driving this novel was to reproduce the confusion, hilarity and social satire in Cervantes’ famous novel; recast from the point of view of an equally con......more