This Edition

Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote was first published 13 March 1752, in two duodecimo-sized volumes, the first probably printed by Samuel Richardson and the second by William Strahan (Brack and Carlile 166). A second edition “Revised and Corrected” (as advertised in its titlepage) appeared in the same format in June, the two volumes printed for Andrew Millar, like those of the first edition (Brack and Carlile 166).¹ Our edition reprints the second one, because the revisions were substantial, even though the passages modified were not numerous (at least considering the length of the work), and changes often involved slight modifications of phrases adding different nuances.

The copy used here is the digital copy of the second edition included in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) database, which reproduces a copy held at the British Library (English Short Title Catalogue, T71886). The first edition has also been collated for variants. The more suitable variants (that is, those which are meant to correct or ameliorate the first edition) have been incorporated into the text, and those discarded are annotated, with the edition in which they appear indicated in parentheses (1^st or 2^nd). The paperback editions of reference –Oxford’s by Margaret Dalziel (1973) and Penguin Classics’ by Amanda Gilroy and Wil Verhoeven (2006)– have also been consulted.

This edition is meant to offer a readable text for the modern reader while remaining close to the original, and thus spelling, capitalisation and punctuation have been regularised to modern standards, albeit with a conservative approach. Spelling is silently modernised in the case of variants of the same word (for example, “entirely” and “intirely”, “stile” and “style”, “exprest” and “expressed”, or “immoveable” and “immovable”). Abbreviations and contractions are expanded, except for those which are customary for readers (such as “I’ll”). Regarding compound words, hyphenation has only been preserved when still used in present-day English, or when the rules of compound formation are consistent with current use. As for capitalisation, the use of capital letters in common nouns for emphasis has not been maintained, neither the use of italics for the same purpose, because of its redundant use in the original. p. 38

Regarding punctuation, the editor has intervened to facilitate understanding and to clarify conversational exchanges between characters which could be confusing for the reader. Double quotations have been used before and after sentences in direct speech and single quotations are used to mark direct speech in a character’s intervention, and direct speech inside direct speech in a character's intervention is indicated by italics within single quotations. Punctuation goes inside quotations. As for the punctuation introducing speech, commas have been replaced by colons. Another alteration in punctuation involves the substitution of two em dashes (— —) for three consecutive dots (…) to mark ellipses, which generally occur to avoid giving proper names and toponyms (for instance, “The marquis of …”).

Also, commas and semicolons separating subjects from verbs, verbs from direct objects, restrictive relative clauses, or the two elements in comparative clauses (“so … as”, “such… as”, “more… than”) have been suppressed. Where possible, original punctuation (particularly, the use of the semicolon) has been retained to reflect the author’s style, which would otherwise be lost (e.g., em dashes to punctuate interrupted speech). Only when it was thought that the original punctuation hindered readability, some minor changes have been introduced. Further typographical, spelling and punctuation inconsistencies or mistakes have been silently emended, where possible.

The original disposition of the text has also been modified sparingly to facilitate readability. Dialogue interventions are separated from the narrative into paragraphs, and when the speech by a single character is divided into multiple paragraphs, quotations shorter than three lines are combined into a single paragraph. Also, to indicate the letters addressed between characters, these texts are marked in italics.

To preserve the author’s original style, some archaic verb endings in “-th “and “-st” have been retained to maintain the bombastic use of language of the protagonist and other characters. However, to ease clarity for the reader, minimal changes affecting morphology have been made, for instance double comparatives have been eliminated, and “you was” has been substituted by “you were.” Archaic verb forms and pronouns have not been altered, but they are annotated when first used. Moreover, the online Oxford English Dictionary has been referred to for defining archaic, colloquial, dialectal, figurative, historical, humorous, literary, obsolete, rare, and specialised terms. The abbreviations included in editorial notes are the following:

arch.     archaic
colloq.     colloquial
dial.     dialectal
fig.      figurative
hist.      historical
hum.     humorous
lit.       literary
obs.      obsolete
spec.      specialised

Numbers within square brackets refer to page numbers in the 1752 revised edition. p. 39

Works Cited

Brack, O. M., and Susan Carlile. “Samuel Johnson’s Contributions to Charlotte Lennox’s ‘The Female Quixote.’” The Yale University Library Gazette, vol. 77, no. 3/4, 2003, pp. 166–73. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40859294

Dalziel, Margaret (ed.). The Female Quixote, or, the Adventures of Arabella. By Charlotte Lennox. Oxford University Press, 1973.

ECCO: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Gale Group. https://www.gale.com/intl/primary-sources/eighteenth-century-collections-online

Gilroy, Amanda, and Will Verhoeven (eds). The Female Quixote. By Charlotte Lennox. Penguin Classics, 2011.

Lennox, Charlotte. The Female Quixote: or, the Adventures of Arabella. 2 vols. London: Printed for A. Millar, 1752. ECCO.

Lennox, Charlotte. The Female Quixote, or, the Adventures of Arabella. 2 vols. 2^nd edition (revised and corrected). London: Printed for A. Millar, 1752. ECCO.

Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 2022. Online edition. https://www.oed.com/

Nora Rodríguez Loro