While recent studies of Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) and Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) have tended to focus upon female intellectual enlightenment as a developmental process that takes place within social contexts, this essay argues that female intellectual capacity in these novels is innate and associated with rural isolation. This inherent female intelligence ultimately serves to contradict stereotypical, eighteenth-century associations of rurality with ignorance. Through presenting rural isolation as the subtext of their novels, this essay elucidates what may be understood as a methodological use of rural isolation as a means of discussing female intellectual capacity and the implications of its innateness within the eighteenth-century, female-authored novel.