SOURCE: Hoople, Sally C. “The Spanish, English, and American Quixotes.” Anales Cervantinos 22 (1984): 1-24.

In the following essay, Hoople traces the influence of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote on Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote and Tenney's Female Quixotism.

Tabitha Tenney's novel Female Quixotism, which was published in Boston in 1801, is, as Duyckinck says, “one of the numerous literary progeny of Cervantes' immortal satire.”¹ Moreover, in many ways Tenney is closely related to two other early authors whose work reflects the influence of Don Quixote. Although Charlotte Lennox was born in New York in 1720, she moved to England in 1735, where her novel The Female Quixote was published in 1752. In spite of tenuous claims that she was the first American novelist², generally she is regarded as an English writer. Her novel, like the greater Don Quixote and the made-in-U.S.A. Female Quixotism, humorously attacks the negative effects of reading romances...