Patronage in the Novels and Letters of Charlotte Lennox

One of the most prolific novelists of the mid-eighteenth century, Charlotte Lennox is chiefly celebrated as the author of The Female Quixote (1752). Her second novel, praised for its “humour and extravagant vagaries,” has often been the focus of critical inquiry at the exclusion of her other novels, which has created a distorted view of Lennox and her corpus. The Female Quixote was one of several novels that led to Lennox’s literary preeminence during the mid-eighteenth century. As Lennox’s career reached its peak during the 1750s, she became more and more involved in systems of patronage. The theme of patronage has significance within her neglected novels Henrietta (1758) and Sophia (1762), written at the height of her fame, which feature friendless heroines at the mercy of arbitrary mistresses and exposed to threats of “sexual patronage” by their suitors. Above all, these novels signal Lennox’s growing dissatisfaction with patronage relations across her long and increasingly frustrated literary career.