Charlotte Lennox

Charlotte Lennox, née Ramsay (c. 1729[1] – 4 January 1804), was a Scottish author and a literary and cultural critic, whose publishing career flourished in London.

Charlotte lived the first ten years of her life in England before her father, who was a lieutenant in the guards, moved the family to Albany, New York in 1738,[2] where he was lieutenant-governor.

[2] Around the age of 13, she was sent to be a companion to her maternal aunt Mary Lucking in London, but on her arrival she found that the son of her future guardian had died and the arrangement was no longer suitable.

[3][2] Lennox's first volume of poetry, Poems on Several Occasions, published in 1747, was dedicated to Lady Isabella and centred partly on themes of female friendship and independence.

She might have been offered a position at court, but this was forestalled by her marriage to Alexander Lennox, and her decision to take up acting and to publish her works (and thereby earn her own income).

She performed in a successful run of The Fair Penitent, which was part of a series of "civic" dramas at Drury Lane dealing with social issues of politics and gender.

When her first novel, The Life of Harriot Stuart, Written by Herself, appeared, Johnson threw a lavish party for Lennox, with a laurel wreath and an apple pie that contained bay leaf.

Hester Thrale, Elizabeth Carter, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, all members of the Bluestocking Society, faulted her either for her housekeeping (which even Lennox joked about), for her ostensibly unpleasant personality, or for her bad temper.

One criticism Lennox had was that his plays strip female characters of their original authority, "taking from them the power and the moral independence which the old romances and novels had given them.

"[5] Samuel Johnson wrote the dedication for Shakespear Illustrated, but others criticized its treatment, in David Garrick's words, by "so great and so Excellent an Author.

Lennox called this magazine "a course in female education" and included the learned subjects botany, history, astronomy, medicine, literary criticism, zoology, and theology.

[2] David Garrick produced her Old City Manners at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1775 (an adaptation of Ben Jonson's Eastward Ho).

In the 20th century, feminist scholars such as Janet Todd, Jane Spencer, and Nancy Armstrong praised Lennox's skill and inventiveness.