50 pages • 1 hour read
Charlotte LennoxThe Female Quixote
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1752A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Volume 2, Books 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Volume 2, Book 5, Chapters 1-3 Summary
Mr. Glanville is “too much in Love” (179) to sleep. He frets about his father’s possible romantic feelings for Arabella, but when he confronts him, Sir Charles surprises him by announcing his desire to cure Arabella of “these little Follies” (180). Meanwhile, Arabella meditates on how to react to Sir George’s letter. She decides to visit him, but as Miss Glanville is mocking her, Mr. Glanville enters. The two women ask him to settle their debate about the correct way to handle a romantic approach. Mr. Glanville immediately sides with Arabella, who shows him the letter sent to her by his “miserable Rival,” Sir George. The letter amuses Mr. Glanville, but he hides his mirth behind a “counterfeited Rage.” When he learns that she plans to visit Sir George, however, he does become angry and asks her not to go. Miss Glanville assures Arabella that Sir George’s claims that he will die without her company are empty. Arabella contents herself with writing a letter, which she shows to the others. In it, she commands Sir George “to live.” Mr. Glanville plots ways to avoid delivering the letter, but his plans are ruined by Sir George’s arrival.
Volume 2, Book 5, Chapters 4-6 Summary
Sir George is convinced that his letter will have been “favorably received” by Arabella. When she enters, Arabella directly commands him not to perform any “Violence” against himself, as he suggested he might. Sir George is surprised that she has shown the letter to her cousins and tries to convince them that it was a joke. Mr. Glanville is angry that Sir George is making jokes at Arabella’s expense. If he does not stop, he will challenge him to a duel.
The arrival of Sir Charles ends the conversation. Arabella worries that Sir Charles wants to declare his love for her. As she decries him for his ungentlemanly behavior, he is baffled by her words. After she walks away, Sir Charles speaks about his pity for his son, who has fallen in love with Arabella. Mr. Glanville assures his father that he will resolve the misunderstanding. He speaks to Arabella, who tells him that she believes that his father loved her.
When Mr. Glanville relates this to his father, Sir Charles immediately understands and assures his niece that he meant no such offense. With the matter seemingly settled, Miss Glanville tries to amuse herself by asking pointed questions to Arabella that she knows Sir George must disagree with. They talk about a famous “Queen of the Amazons” (205), and Arabella immediately launches into a long and detailed description of her romantic novels. Sir Charles cannot help but disagree with Arabella’s views on historical figures such as Cleopatra. Arabella asks Sir George to settle the matter by telling the group about “the most material Passages in his life” (208).
Volume 2, Book 6, Chapters 1-5 Summary
Sir George tells a long and elaborate story about his life. He claims to be “descended from Kings” (209), which amuses Sir Charles. Throughout the story, Sir Charles announces his disbelief and amusement at his “idle Brags.”
First, Sir George tells the story of a milkmaid named Dorothea. He fell in love with her when he was 17 years old, and he describes her beauty in extravagant detail. Though Sir Charles mocks him, Arabella insists that Dorothea was likely a person “of much higher Extraction” who was forced to pose as a milkmaid (216). Dorothea refused Sir George’s declarations of love, and he pined for her until the beginning of the war allowed him to forget about her.
Sir George claims to have fought in the war. On the battlefield, Sir George claims to have killed 50 enemies before being captured by a “brutal Commander” named Prince Marcomire. He was taken to the Prince’s castle, where he discovered that the Prince’s sister, Sydimiris, ordered two people to dress his wounds and care for him. During his recovery, he and Sydimiris fell in love. She helped him to escape from her terrible brother, so he devoted his life to her. Sir Charles laughs at the pompous story, while Arabella praises his knightly duty. She cites examples from romantic novels to justify his actions.
Sydimiris refused to go with Sir George, so he was forced to flee alone, he says. He hid in the local town for a week, then challenged Marcomire for Sydimiris’s honor. Sir George was thrown in prison for several days, where he communicated by letter with Sydimiris. Sydimiris agreed to marry a man she detested on the condition that Sir George would be released, and though he was freed, he felt a “mortal Grief” (236).
Volume 2, Book 6, Chapters 6-9 Summary
Sir George continues his story, recalling a letter Sydimiris wrote in which she claimed that the marriage was the only way she could save his life. She commanded him to live, and Sir George rode away from the town until he found a cave, where he lived in religious solitude. He reflected alone for 10 months, sustaining himself on “Sighs and Tears” (239). Sir Charles and his children are greatly amused, but Arabella cites romantic examples of knights who sustained themselves in similar fashions.
This period ended when Sir George overheard a commotion; he rushed toward the sound and saved a woman from being attacked. He describes the beauty of Philonice, the woman he saved, to whom he offered his services. He returned Philonice to her father, who invited Sir George to his castle. Though he declared his love for Philonice, she also insisted that he should not die for her. When he fell sick and recovered, Philonice’s father promised his daughter’s hand to Sir George. Before the wedding, however, Philonice was kidnapped. He spent years searching for her but was never able to find her.
He reaches the end of his story, expecting Arabella to lavish him with praise for his romantic inclinations. Instead, she decries him as “an Outrage to all Truth and Constancy” for deserting so many women he claimed to love (250). She banishes him from her presence, which delights Mr. Glanville. Sir Charles mocks Sir George, who ruminates on his talents as a storyteller. Mr. Glanville suggests to his family that the group may benefit from a trip to London. Sir Charles agrees but suggests that they first spend a few days in the town of Bath.
Volume 2, Books 5-6 Analysis
Sir George tells a long and elaborate story in which he is very much framed as the protagonist, drawing on Language’s Ability to Connect and Separate. He wants Arabella to see him as a hero, so he tells a story using romantic novel tropes, and to most of his audience, it is clearly a concocted narrative. His inventions work on Arabella, a testament to how strongly she believes in the world of her novels. Sir Charles assumes the place of The Female Quixote’s audience, and his frequent interruptions and mocking comments provide a layer of distance between Sir George’s narration and the real world. Sir George is, fundamentally, an unreliable narrator. He makes himself seem more and more ridiculous as the story progresses, demonstrating his desire to convince Arabella to love him by manipulating her love of French chivalric romance stories. While this portion of the narrative seems to align Sir George and Arabella, Charlotte Lennox subverts this expectation by leaving the most stinging blows to Arabella. This deepens the distinction between their characters—Arabella lives in a fantasy world, but she is earnest whereas Sir George is conniving. At the end of his story, just as he believes that he has convinced Arabella of his heroism, she turns on him. She criticizes Sir George for being a coward and a charlatan, showing how his story is not heroic at all. Sir Charles might be better positioned to determine truth from fiction, but Arabella—through her sincere belief that Sir George’s story is true—delivers a more devastating blow to his reputation.
Structurally, Sir George’s story is an example of a nested narrative. He assumes the role of the narrator, creating a story within a story that reminds the audience of its fundamentally fictional nature. Sir George’s story, delivered by an unserious and unreliable man, provides a parody of the French romances that Arabella loves so much. Importantly, the originator of this parody is a man who does not really love or understand romance novels. He does not realize that his story proves his dishonor, failing to grasp that—as a man who claims to love women and fails to show them any loyalty—he emerges as a villain rather than a hero. Through his fiction, he exposes his true nature as a rake—while Arabella can’t identify his flaws in real life, she can see them in his fiction. He has the right language to satisfy Arabella’s expectations but he ignores the themes that play such an important role. Her criticism of Sir George is, therefore, both a personal and a literary critique. He is not worthy of her love because he does not understand true love.
After the calamity of Sir George’s life story, Sir Charles suggests that the group head to the city. This creates a clear separation in the novel, with the earlier chapters confined to rural areas and the later chapters becoming increasingly urban. All her life, Arabella has been restricted to the countryside, and many characters blame her country upbringing for her strange behavior. This reveals a clear patronizing attitude among the upper classes in which the country is associated with foolishness and a lack of respectability. As such, Sir Charles’s suggestion is more than just a distraction; he seeks to slowly introduce Arabella into urban spaces to obliterate her delusions. He wants to show her a world beyond what she knows, hoping that this will help her enter the real world and become a more respectable match for his son. With this, the following chapters explore a gradual unraveling of Arabella’s delusions.
