In 1756 Charlotte Lennox, already a celebrated novelist—she had just published her most renowned work, The Female Quixote, a year before—translated from the original French one of the most successful novels written by Madame Claudine Gérin, the marquise de Tencin, Mémoires du comte de Comminge (1735). At the time, Madame de Tencin was a controversial public figure, an intellectual woman and one of the most distinguished salonnières in eighteenth-century France. Although Tencin’s name as the authoress of the novel was kept secret until after her death, notwithstanding the outstanding success of her Mémoires, Charlotte Lennox knew that the novel had been penned by a woman and decided to translate it and later serialize it in her feminist magazine The Lady’s Museum, a periodical wholly devoted to women’s literary and cultural education. Lennox’s translation of Tencin’s short novel is here reprinted for the first time after two centuries with critical notes and an introduction, in an edition that takes into account a close comparison between Lennox’s translation and Madame de Tencin’s original French version, and analyses all the variations and addenda that appeared in Lennox’s own version of The History of the Count de Comminge.

Charlotte Lennox (c.1729-1804) was an eighteenth-century London author whose most celebrated novel, The Female Quixote (1752), is just one of eighteen works published over forty-three years. Her stories of independent women influenced Jane Austen, especially in her novels Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility. Susan Carlile’s biography places Lennox in the context of intellectual and cultural history and focuses on her role as a central figure in the professionalization of authorship in England. Lennox participated in the most important literary and social discussions of her time, including debates concerning female authorship, the elevation of Shakespeare to national poet, and the role of periodicals as didactic texts for an increasingly literate population. Lennox also contributed to making Greek drama available for English-language audiences and pioneered the serialization of novels in magazines. Carlile’s work is the first biographical treatment to consider a new cache of correspondence released in the 1970s and reveals how Lennox was part of an ambitious and progressive literary and social movement.

Excerpt from Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, Vol. 2 A forest huge of spears and thronging helms Appear'd, and serried shields, in thick array. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.