Born Charlotte Ramsay, Lennox is known as a versatile woman of letters, part of the eighteenth-century Bluestocking circle and friend to numerous other literary luminaries such as Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and Fanny Burney. She is best remembered for her 1752 novel The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Arabella, an update and parody of Cervantes's Don Quixote, though in the case of The Female Quixote the heroine's delusions are set in motion by her voluminous reading of recent French fiction. It was preceded by The Life of Harriot Stuart (1751), Lennox's first novel, and by Poems on Several Occasions, Written by a Young Lady (1747), her first publication. Her next novel, Henrietta (1758), took a story by Marivaux for its model. It was popular enough that Lennox adapted it for the stage as The Sister, but the play survived only one performance in 1769. Meanwhile, Lennox began a career of editing and translating, including Shakespear Illustrated (1753-1754), which collects novels and stories from which Shakespeare drew many of his plots. She also produced an essay periodical, the Lady's Museum (1760-1) under the pseudonym "The Trifler". Though not the only woman writer of this time to run a periodical, she was something of an innovator, partly because with a title page blazoning "by the author of The Female Quixote" anonymity was a mere fiction, and partly for use of the forum to serialize her next novel, Sophia (1762), which appeared in the Lady's Museum under the title "The History of Harriot and Sophia" from 1760-1. Lennox's play Old City Manners (1775) was much more successful than her previous drama. Her final and far less successful novel Euphemia (1790) was her first attempt at the epistolary form. Lennox completed a number of translations, including Memoirs of Maximilian de Bethune, Duke of Sully (1751), Voltaire's The Age of Louis XIV (1752), The Memoirs of the Countess of Berci (1756), Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon and of the Last Age (1757), The Greek Theatre of Father Brumoy (1759), and Meditations and Penitential Prayers by the Duchess de la Vallière (1774).