A girl raised alone with her father's library takes French heroic romance for a guide to life, and expects every man she meets to be a ravisher or a knight. Charlotte Lennox published it in 1752 with Johnson's help and Richardson's; it is the best English answer to "Don Quixote" and the funniest book of its decade. The cure at the end is administered by a doctor and is more troubling than the disease. Sixty plates of Gainsborough and Reynolds landscapes and portraits, from rocky coasts to Sterne, mirror a heroine who reads every face and shore as a scene from romance.
