The majority of Charlotte Lennox's 1752 novel, The Female Quixote, or The Adventures of Arabella, focuses on actions and outward appearances, particularly those of its eccentric heroine, Arabella, who behaves according to the conventions of the novels she spent her life reading. A genre dating back to ancient Greece and Rome, romance generally deals with the loves and adventures of the nobility, and in the world of the Female Quixote, this definition is limited to referring primarily to English translations of 17th-century French stories, usually situated in an idealized vision of the classical world. Described by John J. Winkler as "an elaboration of the period between initial desire and final consummation", allowing potentially dangerous sexual passion (eros) to find containment in marriage (gamos) (28), common plots of romance prefigure conventions. of domestic fiction from the 18th century, following the tribulations of a pair of lovers until they are firmly established in the social hierarchy of their society. The noble status of the central couple is at the heart of the narrative logic of the romance. Often, their nobility is not recognized by those around them. Status is often treated as an innate quality that separates lovers intellectually, morally, and physically from the commoners around them. Each of their trials throughout the text rearticulates their superiority over their social inferiors as well as their ability to become each other's companions. The Female Quixote perhaps focuses less explicitly on the "right" of one class to rule another, but as in many Georgian novels, it focuses on those who are socially placed above the merchant classes. Lennox's novel reinterprets the social divide of romance in...... middle of paper ......ol. 10. Geneva: Slatkin Reprints, 1972.-----------------------. The story of Sappho (1649-1653). Trans. Karen Newman. The other voice in modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003. Simpson, Antony. “The “myth of blackmail” and the prosecution of rape and attempted rape in 18th-century London: the creation of a legal tradition,” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 77, No. 1. (Spring 1986): 101-150. Weiss, Judith. “Island Beginnings: The Anglo-Norman Romance.” A companion to romance from classic to contemporary. Ed. Corinne Saunders. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.26-44.Watt, Ian P. The Rise of the Novel; Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Winkler, John J., “The Invention of Romance,” in The Search for the Ancient Novel. J. Tatum, (ed.) Baltimore (John Hopkins UP) 1994. pp. 23-38.