The Life of Harriot Stuart — Charlotte Lennox

Description

Harriot Stuart tells her own story: a genteel but turbulent childhood shuttled between Scotland and colonial New York, a string of suitors and elopements engineered by an ambitious mother, a duel fought over her, a kidnapping, and her eventual arrival in London society as a young woman determined to narrate — and control — her own reputation. It was Charlotte Lennox's first novel, published in 1750 when she was barely out of her teens herself, two years before the book that would make her famous, The Female Quixote.

Lennox had her own early years in colonial America before settling in London, where Samuel Johnson became her mentor and Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding both admired her work. Harriot Stuart draws visibly on that transatlantic girlhood, and its heroine's sharp awareness of herself as both "coquette" and narrator gives the book a self-consciousness unusual for its moment. Unlike The Female Quixote, which has stayed continuously in print for over two centuries, Harriot Stuart has never had a modern commercial edition and survives today mainly as a subject for specialists in eighteenth-century and early transatlantic fiction.

Author & Genre

Charlotte Lennox (c. 1729–1804) — Epistolary Novel, 18th Century Fiction, Women's Writing

"You ask me, my dear Amanda, to give you the relation of my life. Your request has always the force of a command with me, and I obey you, notwithstanding the affliction the remembrance of my past misfortunes raises in my soul."