Jodi L. Wyett is Professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. She has published numerous book chapters, as well as articles in such journals as Aphra Behn Online, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, on subjects such as Jane Austen, Frances Brooke, and female quixotism.
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Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Reading, Writing, and Tilting at Windmills: The Woman Writer and the Female Quixote 1 1. The Model Quixote: Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote 27 2. The Defiant Quixote: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Manuscript Romance, and the Market for Mid-Century Fiction 49 3. The Instructive Quixote: Maria Edgeworth, Affective Reading, and the Limits of Didactic Writing 74 4. The Anonymous Quixote? Sarah Green, the Popular Novel(ist), and Posterity 104 5. The Engaged Quixote: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey 132 Epilogue: Screening Female Quixotism: Janeite Fangirls and the Persistence of White, Heteropatriarchal Power 151 Notes 163 Bibliography 221 Index 000
"In this beautifully and expansively written book, Wyett details how quixotism freed major players in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century novel industry who faced stultifying gender and racial expectations. In her hands, quixotism is no longer about mindless engagement in overly enthusiastic fan culture, but it is a powerful tool to reveal the constructedness of reality and enact radical empathy not only centuries ago, but today. From Janeite Fangirls to Bridgerton, you will never dismiss a Quixote again." - Susan Carlile, author of Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind (2018) "Jodi Wyett's Quixotic Authority sheds exciting new light on the familiar figure of the eighteenth-century female quixote. Her elegant writing compellingly brings these much-maligned women to life, displaying all the humor and cleverness of the quixotic novels she analyzes. Wyett's close readings explore these works as appealing popular fictions and, even more importantly, as social commentaries with serious points to make about gender and authorship." - Hannah Doherty Hudson, author of Romantic Fiction and Literary Excess in the Minerva Press Era (2023)