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Intellects in Isolation: A Reading of Retirement in Evelina and The Female Quixote

Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman, University of Stirling

Author Biography

Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman recently received her Master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh and plans to pursue her PhD at the University of Stirling with a focus on novel reading in early nineteenth-century Scotland. She is the Newsletter Editor for the interdisciplinary journal Romance, Revolution and Reform, and her work has recently appeared in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

Abstract

While recent studies of Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) and Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) have tended to focus upon female intellectual enlightenment as a developmental process that takes place within social contexts, this essay argues that female intellectual capacity in these novels is innate and associated with rural isolation. This inherent female intelligence ultimately serves to contradict stereotypical, eighteenth-century associations of rurality with ignorance. Through presenting rural isolation as the subtext of their novels, this essay elucidates what may be understood as a methodological use of rural isolation as a means of discussing female intellectual capacity and the implications of its innateness within the eighteenth-century, female-authored novel.

Keywords

Burney, Frances, 1752–1840; Lennox, Charlotte, 1730(?)–1804; Evelina; The Female Quixote; female enlightenment; intellectual capacity; rural; isolation; retirement; eighteenth-century novel.