"This biography…gives the fullest account of [Charlotte Lennox’s] life yet…and conducts readers through all of her major works. It arrives as a handsome, substantial volume, complete with full scholarly apparatus and a proselytizing zeal of application…It is undoubtedly a good thing that we have a new biography of Charlotte Lennox, and this is an industrious and likeable contender."
Min Wild, Times Literary Supplement, August 15, 2018
"This much-anticipated critical biography of the accomplished yet elusive eighteenth-century author Charlotte Lennox is well worth the wait."
Betty A. Schellenberg, Simon Fraser University, Women's Writing
"There hasn’t been a new biography of Charlotte Lennox since 1967. Susan Carlile’s substantive, scrupulously researched Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind makes up for lost time."
Jayne Lewis, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
"The wide range of Lennox’s writing requires Carlile to become an expert on an extraordinary variety of topics, from Sir Joshua Reynolds’s commission prices, to the political machinations between the Duke of Newcastle and the Duke of Bute in the early 1760s, to the 1774 copyright decision Donaldson v. Becket, to the biography of the Duchesse de La Vallière (a mistress of Louis XIV whose memoirs Lennox translated). This breadth of knowledge both fills in Lennox’s world and shows why Carlile considers her such a significant writer: one whose life and works illuminate many of the key topics of eighteenth-century studies. Charlotte Lennox will be an indispensable and unavoidable resource for any future research on this at once unique and representative figure."
Rachael Scarborough King, University of California, Santa Barbara,, Early Modern Women, Spring 2020
"Carlile gives a vivid picture of the London literary world during the mid to late eighteenth century. She notes that in an era that has been christened ‘The Age of the Emerging Female Author’, Lennox’s professional life bears witness to the greater visibility and acceptance of women writers, as well as to the shift from literary patronage to the growing power of the bookseller, the development of the novel as an important genre, the interrelationships between British and Continental as well as American literatures, and the reassessment of Shakespeare’s works."
Susan Kubica Howard, Duquesne University, Eighteenth-Century Fiction
"Clearly a labor of love, Carlile’s meticulously detailed biography brings to life a woman whose commitment to her own personal autonomy and rejection of conventional thought and behavior make Lennox a woman impossible for readers not to respect, if not like or even also love."
Robin Runia, 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries of the Early Modern Era, Volume 25
"Susan Carlile’s Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind describes in vivid detail a skeptical, ambitious, and spiky eighteenth-century woman of genius. Carlile provides a fascinating, original account of Lennox, who grew up in America, found herself alone as a teen in England, married a ne’er-do-well, and raised challenging children, all the while living, writing, and publishing in near poverty. This is the literary biography of the pioneering author of The Female Quixote that many of us have longed for."
Devoney Looser, Department of English, Arizona State University
"Susan Carlile has proven herself to be the world’s foremost living expert on Charlotte Lennox. Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind represents a watershed moment in Lennox studies and in studies of the eighteenth-century culture more broadly. Drastically reshaping the dominant understanding of just what kind of writer Lennox actually was, Carlile highlights Lennox’s translations and critical work, moving them to the center of Lennox’s story."
Manushag Powell, Department of English, Purdue University
"Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind is a valuable autobiography of a major figure, and brings together fascinating new material to construct a new view of professional authorship in the mid- and late eighteenth century, all from the unusual angle of the female writer."
Isobel Grundy, Department of English, University of Alberta
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