Charlotte Lennox

Charlotte Lennox, née Ramsay (c. 1730 – 4 January 1804) was a Scottish author and poet. She is most remembered now as the author of The Female Quixote and for her association with Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, and Samuel Richardson, but she had a long career and wrote poetry, prose, and drama.

Charlotte Lennox was born in Gibraltar. Her father, James Ramsay of Dalhousie, was a Scottish captain in the Royal Navy, and her mother Catherine, née Tisdall (d. 1765), was Scottish and Irish. She was baptised Barbara Charlotte Ramsay. Very little direct information on her pre-public life is available, and biographers have extrapolated from her first novel elements that seem semi-autobiographical. Charlotte and her family moved to New York in 1738; where her father was lieutenant-governor – he died in 1742, but she and her mother remained in New York for a few years. At the age of fifteen she accepted a position as companion to the widow Mary Luckyn in London, but upon her arrival she discovered that her future employer had apparently become "deranged" after the death of her son. As the position was no longer available, Charlotte then became companion to Lady Isabella Finch.

Lennox's first volume of poetry was entitled Poems on Several Occasions, dedicated to Lady Isabella in 1747. She was preparing herself for a position at court, but this was forestalled by her marriage to Alexander Lennox, "an indigenous and shiftless Scot". His only known employment was in the customs office from 1773 to 1782, and this was reported to be as a benefice of the Duke of Newcastle as a reward for his wife. He also claimed to be the proper heir to the Earl of Lennox in 1768, but the House of Lords rejected his claims on the basis of bastardry, or his "birth misfortunes", as Charlotte tactfully described them.

After her marriage, Lennox turned her attention to acting, but without much success. Horace Walpole described a performance at Richmond in 1748 as "deplorable". She did, though, receive a benefit night at the Haymarket Theatre in a production of The Mourning Bride in 1750. That year she also published her most successful poem, "The Art of Coquetry" in Gentleman's Magazine. She met Samuel Johnson around this time, and he held her in very high regard. 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. Johnson thought her superior to his other female literary friends, Elizabeth Carter, Hannah More, and Frances Burney. He ensured that Lennox was introduced to important members of the London literary scene.

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