TITLE:

THE READING OF THE QUIXOTIC SELF IN EATON STANNARD BARRETT’S THE HEROINE

Author:

Miriam Borham Puyal 

Institution:

Universidad de Salamanca

E-mail:

This paper offers an insight into Eaton Stannard Barrett’s best known work, The Heroine, or, the Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader (1813) and into his contribution to the tradition of female quixotism in English literature. Barrett detaches himself from the model of female Quixotes inaugurated by Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) and returns to a much more Cervantean quixotism. He emphasizes the clash between how the heroine reads herself and how she is being read in society, creating a less domestic Quixote than Lennox’s, in order to stress her epistemological mistakes and heighten the humour, while exposing the dangers of female quixotism for the established social order. Barrett’s originality lays in the social and political dimension of his female Quixote, as well as his censure to her freedom and aspirations.