the female quixote a vivacious and ironical novel parodying the style of cervantes portrays arabella the beautiful daughter of a marquis whose passion for reading romances colors her approach to her own life and causes many comical and melodramatic misunderstandings among her relatives and admirers both joseph fielding and samuel johnson greatly admired lennox and this novel established her as one of the most successful practitioners of the novel of sentiment a book of letters to a friend in which jurgenson discusses different aspects of her bereavement after her two young daughters are killed in a car accident the disappearance combines raw honesty with the solidly balanced craft of the french epistolary novel