The Female Quixote

More then fifty years before Jane Austen picked up a pen, Charlotte Lennox wrote "The Female Quixote or the Adventures of Arabella." Like Don Quixote, Arabella is a main character who believes everything she reads. Raised in isolation by her widower father, Arabella has learned the plots of medieval romances by heart, and paired that with complete ignorance about the "modern" world (1750s).