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rationality as his uncle is of the idée reçue and the material past, the changeable Opal and the stick-in-the-mud Sir Mordent alike must learn the arts of accommodation and embodied rationality as represented in Whim for Whim‟s real reformer‖ (Myers, 1998: 79). And this ideal reformer is the sprightly, witty and virtuous Caroline. Teasing and later curing her lover‘s, Sir Mordent‘s or Mrs Fangle‘s hobby-horses she evinces that she is the only character with a sound judgement. In addition, by so doing, she becomes the author-surrogate, unmasking the hidden personalities and plots, and making sense of the former and the latter alike. READING TO BECOME ONESELF NOT A QUIXOTIC OTHER 627 Opal and Mrs Frangle both beg ―Oh speak Caroline! [...] Can you explain this my story?‖ (2003: 382); and the young heroine, ―Edgeworth‘s symbolic expression of intellectual woman as mediatrix and cultural reformer‖ can and does (Myers, 1998: 80). Caroline moreover epitomises the individual and critical discourse that Edgeworth aims to inculcate in her heroines and her implied readers alike. In a play full of monological discourses that represent each character‘s monomania, Caroline is the only character who can truly read every one of them and reconcile the seemingly contradictory visions of the world. Later heroines echo Caroline in their exegetical effort to make sense of people and their discourses, as well as to cure those same characters from their own limited perception. Edgeworth resumes the gallery of deluded characters in her mature novels to provide a comment, first, on the need for a young woman to read adequately not only texts, but, more importantly, people, and, secondly, on the role wise women perform as insightful mentors. The process towards this awareness and critical reading will hence also be at the core of Edgeworth‘s subsequent works of narrative fiction with a young heroine as main character. 5.2. The Problem of Reading and Being Read: “Angelina; or L‟Amie Inconnue” Maria Edgeworth became extremely popular owing to her moral tales. Among them one stands out: the multi-volume Moral Tales for Young People (1801), which contains several stories aimed at the improvement of its readers and which once more exemplifies the principles of her essays. One of these tales focuses on the matter of women‘s reading and features a literary quixote. ―Angelina‖ is the story of Anne Warwick, a sixteen-year-old orphan under the care of the fashionable Lady Diana Chillingworth, who, after experiencing an absolute lack of attention from her guardian, finds refuge in reading novels. Consequently, she creates a more literary persona under the name ―Angelina,‖ and starts correspondence with Araminta, an author of sentimental novels who befriends her and convinces her to elope and live with her in a Welsh cottage. After arriving at the cottage and finding Araminta gone, Angelina travels to QUIXOTIC READERS AND QUIXOTIC WRITERS 628 Bristol with Araminta‘s ludicrous Welsh maid. In her quest for her unknown friend, Angelina will come across many different characters and will experience humiliating adventures until she is reunited with her beloved author, only to discover that she is a drunk and profligate woman by the name of Rachel Hodges. This discovery, united to her embarrassing adventures, trigger Angelina‘s awakening, and her cure is completed with the advice of the effective maternal figure of the novel, Lady Diana‘s sister, Lady Frances Somerset, and the reading of Lennox‘s The Female Quixote. Anne‘s transformation into Angelina and her return to Miss Warwick exemplifies Edgeworth‘s claim that literature without guidance may confuse young readers in their quest for their own self, rather than enhance their selfidentification. As many other female quixotes, Anne is an orphan, even though she is the protégée of Lady Di, a woman only concerned with fashion and the opinion of the world, who ignores Anne in favour of the sycophantic Miss Burrage, and who overlooks her flights of fancy until they are due to cause scandal. Anne is then twice an orphan, isolated among a group of individual and egotistical females. Disgusted with the shallowness of the company and of society in general, intelligent and good-natured, Anne finds refuge in fiction. As Myers has stated, ―fiction offers the orphaned protagonist a language, a place, a dream of her own,‖ and even if fiction is the reason she errs, at least it offers her ―possibilities for resisting the trivialities of the culture that surrounds her,‖ it provides her with the means to ―define her emotions and to articulate the youthful idealism that the tale values‖ (1989: 29). That is, despite the errors of judgement in which Angelina incurs throughout the novel, from the beginning Edgeworth is ascribing them not only to literature, but also to her youth and her lack of guidance; as Lady Frances concludes, women of Anne‘s ―superiour (sic) abilities require something more than common sense, to direct them properly‖ (1806: 152), as opposed to mere women of fashion. In this sense, as happened with Fielding‘s Adams or Lennox‘s Arabella, Angelina‘s delusion is treated with benevolence and employed to criticise the shallowness of society and the improper education of women. That the satire is aimed more at the surrounding flawed characters than at the quixote herself is stated when READING TO BECOME ONESELF NOT A QUIXOTIC OTHER 629 Lady Frances asserts of Angelina and Lady Di: ―a simpleton of sixteen is more an object of mercy, than a simpleton of sixty‖ (1806: 243). Confronted with such an ineffectual surrogate mother, Angelina must find in fiction the guidance she cannot find in the real but shallow Lady Di. As a consequence, Angelina sets out to find her literary godmother, a motherly figure that can guide her in the process of coming of age and of constructing her true self. In this sense, Angelina anticipates Barrett‘s wandering heroine and shares Mrs Bullock‘s coeval portrait of a rambling quixote, highlighting how Edgeworth subverts the conventions of the eighteenth-century heroine. Rather than following Lennox‘s virtuously immobile quixote, Edgeworth depicts a heroine that does not just sentimentally react to reality, but who also shows initiative and creates her own opportunities for adventure. In addition, Edgeworth departs from Lennox‘s narrative and the tradition she instituted in one other matter: Anne does not follow romantically-imbibed tenets when she elopes, for she does not escape to meet a suitor. What had been the recurrent plot in Arabella‘s romances, or Dorcasina‘s sentimental novels, does not trigger Angelina‘s quixotic quest. It is sentimental female friendship that she quixotically seeks for, and her search proves an original one. Lady Frances, for instance, finds it ―incredible‖ that there is no romantic object with or for whom Angelina has eloped, for she is sure there must be some admirer or lover involved (1806: 150); aware of the common places of sentimental fiction she cannot conceive any other reason for a young girl to take such a step. Therefore, not only the quest itself challenges the conventions of traditional structural patterns for young heroines, but the object of the quest is different to what could be expected from a female quixote deluded by fiction. In this regard, Edgeworth plays with the readers‘ expectations and subverts the tradition of female quixotism itself, negating the two possible endings for her quixotic heroine, happy marriage or ignominious death, because the motives of her quixote negate the heterosexual plots of cure through marriage or of seduction and abandonment. Connecting with prior works of fiction such as Sarah Scott‘s narrative of a utopian female community in Millenium Hall (1762), which is presented as a better option than marriage, Edgeworth constructs a novel that advances a new conception of female bildungsroman, a QUIXOTIC READERS AND QUIXOTIC WRITERS 630 story of development understood as more than a sexual or emotional awakening prior to becoming a wife. She will hence anticipate the stories of female self-construction and independence of the nineteenth or even twentieth century. Despite this rejection of the traditional heterosexual plot, as in any story of development, there exists the same process of delusion and awakening that all female quixotes undergo. Angelina expects adventures to befall her during her rambles throughout the Welsh rough landscape, in the inns or the mountain walks, but her experience will contradict her romantic expectations. Neither the people, nor the dwellings or the situations are what she had learnt to look forward from her novels; instead, in a pattern clearly adopted from Cervantes, reality will prove jocularly different from fiction: rather than idyllic mountaineers, shepherds or innkeepers, she encounters gossips and rude Welshmen and women in resemblance of the human landscape Don Quixote finds at the inn he mistakes for a castle. However, in the tradition of female quixotism, Angelina‘s senses are in perfect order, and she is capable of balancing illusion against reality and to awake to her mistakes. The greatest awakening of course regards every aspect related to her cherished unknown friend, Araminta. First, it is Araminta‘s cottage, very sentimentally named ―Angelina bower,‖ which disillusions her. After a comic arrival in the middle of the night in which the maids take her for a ghost, she finds the cottage excessively sentimental for her taste: too small, too isolated. It is moreover too ―low for so lofty a head‖ (1806: 173). When she is about to enter ―Angelina bower‖ she bumps her head with the ceiling, an image of how reality will recurrently hit her with its harshness. Then, the romantic maids of her novels are transformed into the extremely farcical Betty Williams. Closer to Sancho than to Arabella‘s Lucy, Betty is characterised by her clumsiness, her regional accent and sayings, h

Quixotic Readers and Quixotic Writers: Cervantes’ Daughters in British Narrative Fiction from Lennox to Austen