Avoiding the Appearance of Rape: Mary Smirke's Revised and Corrected Fernando in her 1818 Translation of Don Quixote.

This article analyzes Mary Smirke’s 1818 English translation of Miguel de Cervantes’s *Don Quixote*, highlighting how she blends her own work with earlier translations by Motteux, Smollett, and especially Charles Jarvis. Smirke’s version, published at least 34 times in the nineteenth century but often attributed to Jarvis, notably abridges the interpolated novels and significantly downplays the threat of violence in the bedroom encounter between Dorotea and Fernando (Part 1, Chapter 28). While Smirke’s translation reduces explicit references to coercion and physical restraint, it maintains Dorotea’s constrained position and the theme of deception, a portrayal further softened by nineteenth-century illustrations by Tony Johannot. The study situates Smirke’s translation within her modest editorial role and nineteenth-century cultural sensibilities, emphasizing how her interventions affect interpretations of consent, violence, and agency in this key episode of the novel.