Jodi L. Wyett
Hardback
January 2026 • ISBN 978-1-64453-413-7 • $120.00
Paperback
January 2026 • ISBN 978-1-64453-412-0 • $34.95
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Series
Early Modern Feminisms
Quixotic Authority re-writes the story of what it has meant to be an impassioned womanreader by exploring the female quixote trope within novels and in the professional lives of mid-to late eighteenth-century British women novelists. The female quixote is often a self-centered, deluded, ill-educated homewrecker who must be reformed or punished; yet women writers such as Charlotte Lennox, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Maria Edgeworth, Sarah Green, and Jane Austen did not capitulate to the notion that women novel readers were ignorant and dangerous. Instead, women writers who enjoyed and were absorbed by fiction saw that absorptive quality as something to be reckoned with in relation to their own publishing aspirations, and they deployed female quixotism to assert their own authorial cachet and mediate gendered power issues in a market that offered both increasing access to publication and intense backlash to its attendant social and economic influence. Modern representations of female quixotes and heated debates about who gets to be a fangirl in and of historical adaptations remind us of not only the persistence of white, heteropatriarchal norms that have policed women’s imaginations for centuries, but also the empowering legacy of quixotism’s potential to tilt at those timeworn windmills.
About the Author
