Clarissa: The History of a Young Lady

by Samuel Richardson, Richard Armitage (Narrator), Hattie Naylor (Editor)

Samuel Richardson's Clarissa is a heartbreaking and compulsive piece of epistolary storytelling and one of the world's greatest novels. Published in 1747, it was the precursor to and inspiration for many of the great European novels which followed in its wake.

“The first book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart,” Samuel Johnson

This drama is part of Radio 4's 'Classic Serial' programmes, defined as 'Adaptations of works which have achieved classic status'.
This production has been serialised into four episodes lasting an hour each. It started on Sunday 14 March from 3.00 - 4.00pm and the final part aired on Sunday 4 April. Each episode was repeated the following Saturday from 9.00 - 10.00pm.
Writer Hattie Naylor says, “To me, Lovelace’s relentless and calculating pursuit of Clarissa as a possession, is utterly contemporary. Most of us know a Lovelace. He remains as irresistible and dangerous as ever. This is a very modern tale of vengeance and love.”

In the first part, The Pursuit, beautiful young heiress Clarissa Harlowe is dangerously attracted by the wiles of the notorious libertine Robert Lovelace. Threatened by an imminent marriage arranged with the odious suitor her family have found for her, Lovelace persuades Clarissa to flee with him.

In the second episode, entitled The Flight, Clarissa has been persuaded to flee with the notorious libertine Lovelace, escaping an arranged marriage. In London she begins to learn of the darker side of Lovelace's character as he secures her lodgings in a house of ill repute and begins to use lies, trickery and cruel delusions in an attempt to seduce her.

The third episode, Imprisonment, sees Lovelace trick Clarissa into returning to Mrs Sinclair's house of ill repute, and after she has been drugged, he has his way with her.

The fourth episode is entitled Freedom Regained, in which Clarissa hopes for reconciliation with her family, while an unrepentant Lovelace seeks once again to find her and conquer her soul.

Clarissa Harlowe -
ZOE WAITES

Robert Lovelace -
RICHARD ARMITAGE

James Harlowe -
OLIVER MILBURN

Solmes -
STEPHEN CRITCHLOW

Bella Harlowe -
SOPHIE THOMPSON

Lady Harlowe -
ALISON STEADMAN

Lord Harlowe -
JOHN ROWE

Mrs Norton -
DEBORAH FINDLAY

Anna Howe -
CATHY SARA

Also featuring:
Miriam Margolyes
Julian Rhind-Tutt
Adrian Scarborough
Ellie Beaven
Lisa Hammond
Linda Broughton

All four episodes: http://www.mediafire.com/?2c0zcd8qnut...

Genres: Classics, Fiction, 18th Century, Literature, Romance, Novels, British Literature

Audiobook

First published January 1, 1748

About the author

Pamela (1740) and Clarissa Harlowe (1748) of English writer Samuel Richardson helped to legitimize the novel as a literary form in English.

People best know major 18th-century epistolary novels Sir Charles Grandison (1753).

Richardson, an established printer and publisher for most of his life, at the age of 51 years then wrote his first novel; people immediately most admired him of his time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_...

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would never recommend this book to anyone.

I will say that first off, despite my love of it, despite the fact that it will remain present in my consciousness a long time, and I may write things on it, may deliberately continue my interaction with the text in the way that one sometimes does after finishing a book that has had such an impact upon them.

For it was a completely devestating eight hundred closely written pages, letter after letter after letter. One knew from very early on where the plot was going, but yet it still managed to wreck havoc with my emotions up through the very last page.

It is, in the simplest form, the chronicle of a young woman with a startlingly, unusually, poignantly strong sense of personal integrity, both physical and moral, and the way that the world, from all angles, goes out of its way to destroy that integrity. I do not read it as a tragedy about 'virtue'/chastity, or a reflection of the larger position of women in society at the time, though Clarissa's helplessness certainly does serve as an example of that, for to me it is plainly and simply the story of an individual. As an individual tragedy it is, as I have said, devestating.

The craft of the epistolary novel, though one unfamiliar to most modern readers, is perfectly demonstrated here, as Clarissa and Lovelace's letters reveal plot and character with pitch-perfect pacing and tone. They are both very complicated individuals, perfect creations of a talented author, and the epistolary format was no doubt the most effective one to show that.

I loved this book. I loved this book entirely and intensely. But I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else. Either it would be as devestating to them as it was to me, or they would find the style dull and tiresome. Neither outcome would be particularly profitable to the reader (though, if you like books of this sort and are willing to spend a few days wrapped in the intensity of it...how can I dissuade you?).

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

One reaches the end of Clarissa not so much with a feeling of accomplishment as with a feeling of total exhaustion. Like Frodo finally reaching Mount Doom, you sink back, scarred, your face smeared with ash, murmuring ‘It's done’ as the book falls from your hands, surrounded by gouts of lava and wondering if you'll ever know home or happiness again.

It is very difficult to sum up a book the size of Clarissa. Its length is so overwhelming that its difference from other novels starts to seem not so much a matter of degree, as a kind of category error. There's a real sense in which Clarissa is not a novel at all, but some other thing. I joked when I finished it about turning back to the first page and starting again; but actually, there are few books where this would work better, because who the hell can remember what happened way back then? The last time I read that bit was eleven months ago!

For such a huge novel, the plot is very simple. As summarised on the back cover: ‘Clarissa, in resisting parental pressure to marry a loathsome man for his money, falls prey to Lovelace, is raped and dies’. The action falls roughly into three 500-page phases. In the first, Clarissa is trapped in her family home, dealing with her tyrannical relations and doing her best to resist marrying this guy they've got earmarked for her. In the second phase, having run away with Lovelace, she is trapped in a brothel in London, trying to resist his advances and escape. And in the third, now on her own, she gradually wastes away and dies as Lovelace comes to terms with what has happened.

Each of these phases is drawn out a little too long for modern tastes – for my taste, anyway – but this is not because these sections are emotionally unconvincing, but, on the contrary, because they are so emotionally powerful. The second section in particular I found almost unbearably oppressive – reading endless descriptions of Clarissa's attempts to get away from her prison, and knowing that I had only eight hundred pages of failure, gaslighting and sexual assault to look forward to, was grim. It is surely a hard read for anyone with personal experience of these issues to take on.

The moments of transition between these phases – when she first runs away with Lovelace, and later when she finally escapes from him – are genuinely exciting. In these linking sections, when a few scraps of action briefly intrude on the narrative, the book really comes alive. For all of these reasons, it's one of the few novels where I can imagine an abridged version would work really well.

The single dominating incident of the book, occurring about halfway through, is Lovelace's drugging and rape of Clarissa. This act is never described directly, although everything circles around it: it's the black hole at the heart of the novel, warping everything that comes before and after. It's worth considering this rape in some detail, because it's here I think that Richardson interacts most revealingly with contemporary assumptions, and it helps explain why the book cast such a shadow over the rest of eighteenth-century literature.

It's notable that Lovelace has to drug Clarissa first, and have her held down by his accomplices, because without such details Richardson would hardly have been able to generate a sense of outrage at all. One of the first things Clarissa's friends and family want to know, after it all comes to light, is whether there was ‘anything uncommon or barbarous in the seduction’ (as her best friend puts it) – because otherwise, who cares? A lot of sex at the time was, as literature makes uncomfortably clear, extremely close to rape anyway. This is especially obvious in French novels, like Crébillon fils's Le Sopha, but it's also there in the more sentimental and bourgeois literature of England: outside of marriage, there were simply no conventions under which a woman could agree to a sexual encounter and still keep her ‘honour’. To remain respectable, she required coercion.

Although couples who were into each other must, in practice, have found plenty of ways to signal such things, in a formal sense consensual sex was left looking not very different from unconsensual. ‘It is a maxim with some,’ Lovelace breezes, ‘that if they are left alone with a woman, and make not an attempt upon her, she will think herself affronted.’ So although he does not at first plan to force Clarissa with violence, he also doesn't expect her to be a willing participant.

…for what, thinkest thou, have I taken all the pains I have taken, and engaged so many persons in my cause, but to avoid the necessity of violent compulsion? But yet, imaginest thou that I expect direct consent from such a lover of forms as this lady is known to be?

The italicisation of ‘direct consent’ shows what a ludicrous concept it is to him. Instead, his ‘main hope is but in a yielding reluctance,’ he says, without which ‘whatever rapes have been attempted, none ever were committed, one person to one person’. What he's saying there, in case the language is unclear, is that every so-called ‘rape’ really ends with the woman giving in and going along with it. ‘There may be consent in struggle; there may be yielding in resistance,’ he says later; ‘even her own sex will suspect a yielding in resistance,’ he predicts. Of course, Lovelace is intended to be a despicable villain, but nevertheless the assumptions behind his villainy say a lot of uncomfortable things about the book's social context.

The fact that Clarissa doesn't reluctantly yield, and that Lovelace does have to resort to ‘violent compulsion’, is one of the things intended to illustrate the heroine's status as a paragon of idealised womanhood. She, no less than the other characters, understands rape as being awful not (as we might see it) because of the physical violence or breach of bodily autonomy, but rather because of the transgression of that nebulous quality, her honour. The sexual act in itself is a trivial detail – the ‘most transitory evil; and which a mere church-form makes none’, as Lovelace dismisses it. Rape was, after all, basically a crime of property – and since her family have given her up, Lovelace wonders,

whose property, I pray thee, shall I invade, if I pursue my schemes of love and vengeance?—Have not those who have a right in her, renounced that right?

From this point of view, what has actually happened hardly matters compared to what people will assume has happened.  As early as her first elopement, Clarissa realises: ‘I cannot leave him with reputation to myself’; and afterwards, Lovelace assumes (wrongly, it turns out) that the dishonour of what has happened will prevent her from ever broadcasting it.

Nothing but the law stands in our way, upon that account; and the opinion of what a modest woman will suffer, rather than become a viva voce accuser, lessens much an honest fellow's apprehensions on that score.

Her sense of being wounded morally, and almost spiritually, perhaps helps to explain Clarissa's slow death in the last third of the novel, which from a purely medical point of view is otherwise totally baffling. In effect, she dies from offended sensibility. This is meant to be inspiring, but for a modern reader, it's hard to sympathise with her insipidly forgiving attitude, in which she positively welcomes her own suffering in a sort of ecstasy of religious masochism. ‘Most happy has been to me my punishment here!—happy indeed!’ she gushes, amid a profusion of Biblical quotations. Her convert and admirer Belford talks admiringly of her ‘religious rectitude…which has taught her rather to choose to be a sufferer than an aggressor’. Rebecca West has deconstructed this attitude at length in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; I think we know enough now to be suspicious of its moral value.

Instead, it is to Clarissa's bestie Anna Howe that we must look for some traces of common sense. She is pleasingly unforgiving of what has happened to Clarissa, and consistently connects it with the prevailing conditions of sexual inequality in society at large. ‘Well do your sex contrive to bring us up fools and idiots in order to make us bear the yoke you lay upon our shoulders,’ she writes to Belford (anticipating almost word-for-word arguments that Mary Wollstonecraft would make some fifty years later). Her rant about never wanting to get married is a joy:

But there must be bear and forbear, methinks some wise body will tell me: but why must I be teazed into a state where that must be necessarily the case; when now I can do as I please, and wish only to be let alone to do as best pleases me? And what, in effect, does my mother say? ‘Anna Howe, you now do everything that pleases you: now you have nobody to control you: you go and you come; you dress and you undress; you rise and you go to rest; just as you think best: but you must be happier still, child!—’

As how, madam?

‘Why, you must marry, my dear, and have none of these options; but in everything do as your husband commands you.’

This is very hard, you will own, sir, for such a one as me to think of.

We are supposed to like Anna, but we are also supposed to see that she has flaws, and this opposition to a decent marriage is, I think, intended to be one of those flaws – one that's eventually overcome. Her presence here – feisty, but eventually finding happiness in wedlock – points the way forward for fiction: if you rewrite the book from Anna Howe's perspective, you get a Jane Austen novel. By Austen's time, the kind of things that happened to Clarissa had to be palmed away on to background characters like Lydia Bennet.

When Clarissa came out, the whole concept of women's sexuality was going through a huge shift: women went from being thought of as essentially lubricious and sexually voracious (as had been the prevalent idea in the Middle Ages), to being thought of as vulnerable guardians of delicacy and honour. (‘Purity of manners,’ Clarissa says, ‘ought to be the distinguishing characteristic of our sex.’) The change was motivated in part by a desire to protect women from male predation, but it came at a cost, and the cost was denying that they had any sexuality at all. All these trends are crystallised really strongly in Richardson, and they show up especially sharply when you compare him to contemporaries like Fielding or Smollett.

These things certainly seem to offer plenty of reasons to recommend reading the novel, and it's a bit strange for me to find myself writing so much (and I could keep going for twice as long – though don't worry, I won't) about a book when I found the actual experience of it, at the time, to be so often gruelling or tedious. But it may just be the case that reading about Clarissa is, in the end, a lot more interesting than reading about Clarissa.

[Manny]

For people who haven't seen the haiku version:

To Miss Howe: send help!
I've been ravished in Book Six
with three more to go

[MihaElla · Rating 5 out of 5]

This turns out to be a great read and, surprisingly, it gets more and more personal the more I read. Odd enough, but I am loving it. It has a mesmerizing effect to see oneself in a sort of double planes, even if it all seems so far away, in all senses. In this regard, I am recalling a text I have once read which I have kept because it helps always see things in an elastic perspective: ≪ You can’t skip chapters, that’s not how life works. You have to read every line, meet every character. You won’t enjoy all of it. Hell, some chapters will make you cry for weeks. You will read things you don’t want to read, you will have moments when you don’t want the pages to end. But you have to keep going. Stories keep the world revolving. Live yours, don’t miss out. ≫



…to be continued, while I am approaching the end of the book 😁

Wow. I take a moment or two to celebrate that I have just finished reading Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady . And I had read it with enthusiasm. In fact, I had read something with a hearty and wholesome dose of sentimentality. Bravo to me! 🥳
Now, if I am asked "Have you read Clarissa?", my heart will jump straight to my mouth, quickly to say that I have enjoyed it wholly and didn’t feel at all the imperious need human nature, in truth to quarrel with its prolixity, as I made sure I had read instead of a shorten labour, some expedite pleasure, or an abridged history, the original masterpiece.
The novel is a tragedy, telling a very unhappy story, with an extraordinary intensity of feeling. I felt that the author abandoned himself to the full swing of passion, producing a nobel, a most pathetic and sublime work. I was caught from first pages and I was eager all the way to get to the conclusion, the more as I have been irremediably seduced, or rather melted, with some deeply moving expressions put in the words well, better said, in the mouth of a very young innocent girl. One could say I have been infected by it, as I couldn’t leave it or read anything else meantime. It was a good book for me. As soon as I began to read it, I was moved in a passion of excitement about Clarissa and her misfortunes and her scoundrel Lovelace. Though a work of fiction it had stamped its fascinating influence on me. I am ready to admit I am hot in my admiration of Clarissa, in fact I greatly appreciate the genius of the author. It is a fine, powerful, penetrating novel with a plenty of knowledge of the heart, which is enough for me to get it on board :)
The tale is very simple, the scene is laid in a high rank of life, and the characters are drawn with a bold pencil. Clarissa, a young lady of quality depicted by the author as a character approaching perfection, is persecuted by a tyrannical father and brother, an envious sister, and the other members of a family, in order to compel her to marry a very disagreeable suitor. All these intrigues and distresses she communicates, to her friend miss Howe, a young lady of an ardent, impetuous disposition, and an enthusiast in friendship. After a series of sufferings, rising almost beyond endurance, Clarissa is tempted to throw herself upon the protection of her admirer Lovelace, a character that devoted his life and his talents to the subversion of female virtue. Sadly, not even the charms of Clarissa, or the generosity due to her unprotected situation, can reconcile him to the idea of marriage.
Being a sort of ‘romance’ there is a bit or a lot of exaggeration in the characters’ depiction but I didn’t mind it, because let’s face it, in the history of real life, that which is actually true bears often very little resemblance to that which is probable. Basically, Lovelace character is highly coloured. He is mainly driven by his love of intrigue and of plots, ambition, pride and desire to humble the girl’s family, to lower the pride of the girl, whom he always seems to have intended for his wife at some future period…
I have exceedingly liked that the author threw his narrative into the epistolary style of writing. The story is told in the correspondence of the leading characters, who are exceedingly addicted to letter-writing, surely as correspondents never were before, though maybe there were but we haven’t learned about them or their letters ;) Some of them write so copiously that it is hard to understand how they find time for sleep or for meals, not to speak of the business which the letters record.
By resorting to this method of telling his story the author undoubtedly gained not a little. Of course, I am talking about my view. By keeping himself out of sight, the author made me very familiar with the hearts of the several correspondents in their secret workings and ensured the continuity of my interest in them, by impressing the details of the story in repeated narratives. Richardson had faith in the reality of his story and its personages. He believes in them himself, and he makes his readers believe in them. In fact, they seem to be no creatures of imagination, but living beings. So, our attention is fixed on a small group of figures, of whose surroundings we know but little. There is no broad landscape behind them; there is no sense give us of a great world of life bustling around, and, by chance, intermeddling with them. But as of the little group in the foreground, we are instructed with microscopic minuteness in most of their ways, and many traits are brought into view, that give a certain air of nature to the course of events.
Furthermore, I have liked a lot that Richardson is mighty in sermons and never weary of pointing a moral. It was high pleasure for me to follow attentively his habit of preaching about his characters and of holding them up for warning or for example, as if they were real beings and not mere phantoms of the brain.
I have tried hard to recall if I met in the whole world of literature but then, sadly, I had read so little so far a villain more desperate than Lovelace; or anything more tragic than the alternate rage and deluge of feelings with which his crime fills the reader… His ‘crime’ the violation of a virgin forms the pivot of the story. Lovelace is the name for an agreeable rake. His character is depicted with wonderful subtlety, though a being made up of such contradictions could never have existed (!), I believe in him as a reality, and accept him alternately as fascinating and detestable: a man likely to win the favour of a lady and yet a wretch not fit to live. He is richly endowed with personal beauty, wit, keenness of his observations, rare assurance, that rivet our attention and compel our admiration, that temporarily blind us to the cold rancour of his nature and to the ruffian conduct which is in him its fruit. His life is deformed by vice till it darkens into crime, and he revels in crime for the glory of it. His letters are the most vivacious in the whole correspondence – always sparkling, always readable – full of wit, spirits, gaiety, of power of dealing with solemn subjects…
The sort of oppression to which Clarissa was subject, and which drove her to her doom, is surely now impossible in all European families, methinks. I admit it was even a challenge for me to fix in my mind that in those old times the girls used to kneel daily to their parents to ask a blessing; a simple good morning was not held to be sufficient for greeting, they were to be forcibly married, sensible or insensible to a suitor whom they loathed, and in most cases the bride was as young, as helpless and as reluctant as Clarissa, and the bridegroom as old and as decrepit, as hideous and as debauched as Solmes…
There was no surprise that once in the power of Lovelace her fate is sealed. Not only is he determined to possess her person, cost what it may, but unsatisfied with a brute victory he stupefies her with drugs before he has courage to commit the capital offense he would try to degrade her mind to patient existence as his mistress and reduce her to the level of the inmates of a brothel. His fiendish determination is actuated by the wounded pride of a man repulsed by the family of a lady to whom he is superior in birth. I am wisely reminded that his conduct in this regard is of a piece with that of the Magua, the red Indian in Fenimore’s ‘The Last of the Mohicans’, who carries off Cora, the beautiful daughter of a general from whom he had received some injury, to serve him in his wigwam – at once his slave and his concubine.
It is not till she is in the power of Lovelace that the full glory of Clarissa’s character shows itself, whilst Lovelace’s theory that once subdued a woman is always subdued, is failing irrevocably.The conduct of the injured Clarissa through the subsequent scenes, most affecting ones, raises her, so far above all around her, that her character beams with like superhuman splendour. Our eyes weep, our hearts ache, yet our feelings triumph with the triumph of virtue, with the dignity of Clarissa, despite her disgrace and misfortunes, reminding us as per the saying of an ancient poet, that a good man, struggling with the tide of adversity, and surmounting it, was a sight which the immortal gods might look down upon with pleasure.
Eventually I had to agree with the author: he had to show, for example sake, a young lady struggling nobly with the greatest difficulties, and triumphing from the best motives, in the course of distresses, which would have sunk most of the hearts, yet tenderly educated, born to affluence, naturally meek, although, where an exertion of spirit was necessary, manifesting itself to be a true heroine…
Overall, it was with a deep and overwhelming interest that I have read the history of the inimitable Clarissa. Took me a bit more than a couple of months but it was completely worth my while :))

[Kristi Siegel · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was a little girl, I dreamed of being a nun or a convict.

In my romanticized view, both situations provided a room and isolation. What more could anyone want? Space and isolation: the perfect ingredients to read endlessly and without interruption.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth, and my notions about being a convict were particularly skewed. There’s nothing romantic about being imprisoned, and Clarissa--more than most fictional characters would have much to say on the topic.

* * *

There are characters who float away almost as soon as you’ve put down the book, while others, even years later, remain vivid. I’m not sure what accounts for this.

The unabridged version of Clarissa exceeds 1500 pages, and yet the novel doesn’t seem that long. Though critics, such as V. S. Pritchett, have coolly and dismissively categorized the book as exemplifying the “principle of procrastinated rape,” the plot is secondary; Clarissa’s character animates this novel.

In contrast to a heroine like Moll Flanders bustling about in her world, Clarissa’s movements are small, and we perceive her world as though through a microscope. Clarissa is ill equipped to deal with her hostile environment – a world of materialism and hypocrisy. Clarissa doesn’t have the flexible morality that would serve her well. She operates by a strict code of moral conduct, and her disinclination to adapt guarantees her downfall--at least by the norms of her society.

The details of Clarissa’s setting are scant. Richardson creates here a mindscape rather than a landscape. In this blank world, the details that remain—a desk, a key, a lock, a room, a coffin, etc.—gain a heightened significance. From the beginning, the images used form a pattern of obstruction and closure.

The female code of conduct in the eighteenth century creates blockage as well. For example, women were not able to able to express their feelings during courtship. A humorous illustration of the problem this code creates occurs with Arabella and Lovelace. Lovelace initially courts Arabella but has become attracted to Clarissa. He cannot simply “dump” Arabella without causing serious offense. Cleverly, Lovelace uses punctilio to his advantage. He asks Arabella some question requiring immediate consent (we are not told what), since he knows—to not appear overeager—Arabella must deny him. While Arabella mistakenly believes Lovelace is simply playing the courtship game, Lovelace is now free to act as though he thought Arabella’s denial was final and move on.

Not surprisingly, the choice of a woman’s suitor depended largely on what her family dictated. But Clarissa cannot acquiesce. Her family’s choice, Mr. Solmes, is unthinkable. To Clarissa, he is the antithesis of subtlety and decorum, a “monster in her eye.” Marriage to him would represent a bondage so extreme Clarissa declares, “I would rather be buried alive, indeed I had, than have that man!” However, in this instance and in others throughout the book, Clarissa may as well have been speaking in a foreign tongue. Her mother ignores the remark, apparently interpreting it as babble.

Significantly, none of the other characters understand Clarissa either. Even her closest friend, Anne Howe, often underestimates her strength of will, and advises her to marry Lovelace long after Clarissa has rejected him entirely, having judged his actions unspeakable. Clarissa moves toward further alienation. Her actions--deriving from a moral code far above that of her society--create a situation where she is continuously misunderstood. Further, Clarissa becomes literally alienated as her setting becomes more confined. Her main activity—writing in her closet—illustrates her isolation. When she again refuses to marry Solmes, her family’s restrictions effectively turn her bedroom into a prison.

Her family’s confinement underscores their naïve belief that by shutting her up they may appropriate her person. Unlike Solmes and her family, Lovelace operates on a higher plane. He realizes Clarissa exists as a plenitude of one, a world within herself, hermetically sealed and inviolable. Lovelace’s aim is more demonic. He wants to shatter her resolve, for it is just this self-sufficiency that maddens and threatens him. Even Lovelace, though, cannot destroy her.

It is Clarissa’s character that makes this story compelling. In the face of pressure and humiliation, her fineness remains intact, and she never yields.

[Sherwood Smith]

Reread: no change

Once you accept the lugubrious plot of the longest English novel (pure and innocent girl is Wronged, fades away into angelic death) this book is fascinating on so many levels.

Apparently Richardson worked on it for years. And that includes after initial publication--he amended it significantly twice, after reading both published and private reviews. Unfortunately his emendations mostly were additions to hammer the point home that no, Clarissa realio trulio was saintly and pure and good and submissive (and therefore must die), and Lovelace a devil in thin disguise, adding on massive wordcount to shove readers firmly into accepting his judgment. He was appalled that many readers liked Lovelace, and wanted a happy ending for them both.

The thing is, the book is great--still great--in spite of that hammer.

First of all, the reader can watch the invention of the English modern novel as this book develops. Richardson plays around with narrative voice, POV, dialogue and dialogue attributions as he tries to juggle the inner and outer lives of all his characters. The result, I think, is fascinating: narrative commentary, footnotes, play format, stream of consciousness, omniscient narrator, third person limited, and of course first person epistolary make up a splendid tapestry of narrative experimentation made lively by irony here, passion there.

Then there is the historical context. The close reader will discover customs and attitudes of the time that all the characters accept as givens, but which we will find peculiar, enlightening, horrifying, and sometimes bewildering. Expressions we think we understand have origin meanings now forgotten, for example, "raising a family." Very, very important concept--but it's not about educating one's children so much as using education as one of the many tools to boost one's family into a higher social realm. So children are expected, as their duty to their parents, to raise the family--boys by doing great things in the world and girls by marrying up.

Finally, and most intriguingly, there is the battle of the sexes. When the reader reflects on the central turning point of the book being a rape, suddenly Richardson's quaint language and people in their wigs and laces transform into moderns, facing the complex tensions of male-female relations now.

Richardson wants us to believe that a good girl is obedient and submissive, first to her father (and brothers) and then to her husband. Her purity is her single most important commodity. If we look past that absurdity (which we have been struggling against for the centuries since), what we have here is a novel about agency.

Jane Austen picked up on this when she began writing, with her assumption that what women think matters--that their lives are not solely about holding onto their "purity" until marriage. I say "picked up" because Jane Austen's work is in dialogue with Richardson's; he, though a male author, possessed enough sympathy and understanding of women to have created a cast of interesting females.

However much we might roll our eyes at Clarissa's six hundred pages of dedicated "I have lost my purity so I must die" at the end of the novel, we can still feel for her because Richardson created a smart character with wit and determination. At the wise age of eighteen she tries to be submissive to her parents--in the very beginning, we learn that her grandfather had left her a significant fortune, which she promptly signs over to her father because she is a good, submissive girl.

Unfortunately for Clarissa, her father is a pompous fatwit, and her brother is even worse--his letters to her are full of innuendo about how she must submit to the loathsome Soames, that she must be mastered, that marriage will snuff out her pertness . . . using the language of rape.

Readers of the time were riveted; letters and memoirs then, and since, are full of oblique references to what goes on in the family home when brothers are taught that they are the masters of young sisters, until Virginia Woolf decided to spell it out bluntly.

And that's the key, I think: in the parade of twits and hypocrites and spiteful sisters and overbearing parents and vile sneaks (who once, when young, had hopes of a good life but were tricked and lied to) we find the traces of people, and problems, we know now. Pretending they don't exist doesn't make them go away.

At the novel's center is the vexing snarl of questions about the nature of love, attraction, obsession and possession, and above all, trust. Clarissa might eventually have been wooed into loving Lovelace--she did find him handsome and witty--but he betrayed her trust, and he could never be made to understand that. And his reasons for the rape are more complicated than you'd think.

Obviously it takes time to read. That's daunting to today's life in the fast lane. But I believe every literature lover ought to read it once, and do it when there are others to discuss it with. And you might find it a whole lot more entertaining than you would have thought: it was not only a best-seller in England, but it was fast translated into other European languages, and had a profound effect on a variety of artists, including Mozart. (Listen to Don Giovanni again after reading this book.)

Though the language and customs are so very mid-eighteenth century, the emotions and motivations are resonantly relevant, and the book can spark endless debate. And thereby--one hopes--enlightenment. We humans certainly have a long way to go.

[J · Rating 1 out of 5]

The experience of reading this book is akin to being dragged though a bog of broken glass and tobasco sauce. Face down. By a very slow mule. The story's intent is to show that the ultimate virtue a girl can have is passivity no matter what awfulness the world sends her way. I read the 600 page ABRIDGED version for school and was so traumatized I didn't read another book for a year. Samuel Richardson should be boycotted out of the Canon. Wolstonecraft kicked his ass.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a shame it is that due to the practicalities of page-count, it's Richardson's Pamela which always turns up on university 'history of the novel' courses rather than the far superior Clarissa - discounted by its unwieldy 1500 pages. While both share an epistolary style, and a narrative turning on the sexual pursuit of an innocent girl by a predatory man, Pamela's marriage turns one into a comedy (albeit one with dark shades of gender at its heart) while Clarissa maintains a tragic intensity to the end.

The first 300 or so pages (and the last 150-200) require patience from the reader (or judicious skimming) as they're slow and largely repetitive: the young, beautiful and virtuous Clarissa is besieged by her nouveau riche family to marry the repellent Solmes to consolidate their new social status. Locking her in the house, sometimes in her room, and striving to cut Clarissa off from her epistolary friendship with Anna Howe, her family instead succeed in thrusting Clarissa into the arms of the machiavellian rake, Robert Lovelace. And this is where Richardson complicates the familiar C18th narrative of female virtue under siege by libertine masculinity: for not just is Lovelace the most charming of rogues, he's also a man, it seems, genuinely in love with Clarissa and awkwardly in thrall to the idea of the very virtue in her which he seeks to stain and steal.

The tension that drives the book forward from this point is not just the battle between Clarissa and Lovelace, but the one within Lovelace's own soul. He knows himself to be the archetypal villain but he could oh so easily be something very different - the vacillations, the moments when he decides to seduce Clarissa, by violence if necessary, only to find his own body rejecting his brutal aims are masterpieces of fiction and give Lovelace a psychological complexity that we don't expect from the self-admitted scoundrel of the piece - or, indeed, from the novel form so early in its evolution.

Clarissa, while having less room to grow given Richardson's moralistic portrait of virtuous, angelic femininity, yet reveals a complicity in her fate: for she reacts to Lovelace's attractiveness in the same way as we do, and there are intimations of desire, however unadmitted, on her side which serve to complicate the narrative.

At around p.900 we have a sensational development: Lovelace finally drugs and rapes Clarissa, an event which is recounted in few words and an aura of overawed silence: 'I can go no farther. The affair is over. Clarissa lives.' Clarissa's own response is equally telling: we have a series of ragged and torn letters (known to critics as the 'mad papers') which articulate her brokenness.

But this is far from the end - with still 600pp to go, Richardson ekes out the situation and now the moral equation gets turned on its head: Lovelace's allies and acquaintances start to side with Clarissa...

Richardson's use of the letter format is masterly once Clarissa has run away to London with Lovelace: letters proliferate to include inserts to and from other writers, complicating ideas of communication, ownership and story-telling. They also serve to keep the dramatic tension high throughout with their immediacy and lack of teleology - at the time of writing the ending is not known. Throughout, Richardson employs motifs of enclosure and entrapment in relation to Clarissa, from the literal doors and keys that keep her inside to the violated body which enfolds her virtuous soul.

A long book, then, and one which takes its very leisurely time to get where it's going: there are places at the beginning and the sort of epilogue to the long-drawn out end where I found myself skimming impatiently, but alongside the historicised ideology of the virtuous woman who has to keep herself pure for the patriarchy are more complicated versions of masculinity and femininity, desire and sexuality, power and impotence.

[Peiman E iran · Rating 1 out of 5]

‎دوستانِ گرانقدر، این کتاب یکی از آن دسته رمانهای بسیار طولانی و خسته کننده است که میتوان گفت داستانی هیجان انگیز برای خواننده نداشته و یا نکتهٔ آموزنده و جالب توجه ای نیز ندارد و مشخص نیست مشهور شدنِ آن به چه سبب بوده است!! میتوانم در زیر چکیده ای از این رمان را برایتان بنویسم
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‎شخصیتِ اصلی این رمان، دختری جوان است که <کلاریسا هارلوو> نام دارد... کلاریسا از رابطهٔ جنسی و سکس، ترس دارد و از ازدواج کردن و یا رابطهٔ دوستی با جنسِ مرد نیز میگریزد و از نظرِ روانشناسی میتوان او را دختری دانست که ناتوانی جنسی دارد... از سویِ دیگر مردانِ هوس باز و هرزه همیشه به دنبالِ آن هستند که او را فریب داده و به او دست یابند و کامی از بودن و خوابیدنِ با او خوش کنند... کلاریسا با آنکه دختری ساده و زودباور است، ولی همیشه در برابرِ این مردانِ هرزه ایستاده و بدنش را دست نخورده، نگاه داشته است و تنها دوستی که دارد، <دوشیزه هُوو> میباشد... شاید برخی نام این رفتارِ کلاریسا را پاکدامنی بگذارند
‎کلاریسا از نظر اجتماعی از خانواده ای اشرافی و مشهور میباشد، ولی چه در خانواده و چه در میانِ دوستان و آشنایان، همه به او حسادت کرده و آرزویِ شکستِ او را دارند
‎داستان از آنجایی رنگ و بو میگیرد، که مردی هرزه و فریبکار به نامِ <لاولیس> که خلبانیست از خانوادهٔ اشرافی، به زندگیِ کلاریسا وارد شده و داستان به رابطهٔ آنها میپردازد... لاولیس نیز نمیتواند کلاریسا را به خود جذب کند و با او سکس داشته باشد... سرانجام برای دست یافتن به کلاریسا، به او دارویِ خواب آور داده و او را بیهوش کرده و به او تجاوز میکند.... زمانی که خانواده از این موضوع باخبر میشوند، سخنِ کلاریسا را باور نکرده و دوست و آشنا و خانواده، او را بی آبرو و بی شرافت خوانده و او را از خود رانده و به آزار و اذیتِ او میپردازند
‎کلاریسا دخترِ بیچاره، زندگی اش نابود شده و مال و داراییِ خویش را نیز از دست میدهد و مجبور میشود تا به نواخانه ای پناه برده و میانِ گدایان و تن فروشان، شب را به روز رساند
‎کلاریسا در همان گداخانه، بیمار شده و دیده از جهان فرو میبندد... تنها کسی که به پاکی و راستگوییِ کلاریسا باور دارد و از حقیقتِ ماجرا آگاه است، پسر عمهٔ او <سرهنگ موزر> میباشد..... سرهنگ موزر برایِ انتقامِ خونِ کلاریسا، با لاولیس آن مردِ هرزه، دوئل کرده و او را به هلاکت میرساند
‎داستانِ زندگیِ کلاریسا را دوستِ صمیمی اش <دوشیزه هُوو> جمع آوری میکند.. کلاریسا پیش از مرگ، رویدادهایِ زندگی خویش را به صورتِ نامه و خاطراتِ روزانه، برایِ دوشیزه هوو فرستاده است و این نامه ها، داستانِ زندگیِ غم انگیزِ کلاریسا را تشکیل داده است ... درکل کتاب ترکیبی از نوشته ها و روایت ها و نامه هایِ کلاریسا میباشد
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‎امیدوارم این ریویو در جهتِ آشنایی با این کتاب، کافی و مفید بوده باشه
‎<پیروز باشید و ایرانی>

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve been reading this for about 20 years (well ... six months) and have finally reached the end with the aid of smelling salts and Kendal mint cake. This is a massive book, over a million words; 1500 closely packed pages. It is, of course, a classic and a milestone in the history of the novel. It is told in epistolary form and is in actuality a very simple story.
The central character, Clarissa is 19, trying to avoid an unwanted arranged marriage set up by her newly rich family. She unwisely accepts the protection of Lovelace a notorious rake and aristocrat who has fallen out with her family. She is virtuous and holds onto her virtue for as long as she can. He becomes impatient and rapes her. She dies a noble death a couple of months later and various retributions are meted out. It is a lot more complex than that with many players. Richardson has plenty of time to develop characters, but Clarissa still manages to be too good to be true and Lovelace a spoilt, emotionally stunted thug. In reality there is enough material for a brief novella.
It is a morality tale with good triumphing over evil, plenty of repentance, villains getting their comeuppance and page upon page of soul-searching. It was an interesting enough book, revolutionary and rather shocking in its time and worth a read if you break a leg and can’t move for about six weeks.

[Kate]

Update 10/15

Oh my god you guys, did you know Goodreads has a character limit for reviews? And I seem to have run up against it. HOW APPROPRIATE.

Continued here.

Update 10/1

Not much progress, but I’m updating again because last night I had my first Clarissa-related dream – and it was a nightmare, about Lovelace coming to get me. I don’t remember much about it. I woke up, was pissed off, went back to sleep, and then the damn thing started up again.

So, this seems like as good a time as any to post a plot update.

After they left the inn, Lovelace tricked Clarissa into taking an apartment at a notorious whorehouse, run by an older woman and her two daughters, both of whom Lovelace had previously ‘ruined.’ These ladies were impatient for him to similarly ‘ruin’ Clarissa. They helped him copy and steal all of her letters, preventing her friend’s rescue schemes.

Lovelace also hired someone to pretend to be an emissary from Clarissa's less-shitty uncle, ostensibly pursuing a family reconciliation if she’s a married woman – but this was all to make her comfortable and drop her guard, because he has only fleeting intentions of actually marrying her. Lovelace took ipecac to make himself sick so she would rush to his bedside, and he set fire to the living room curtains so he would have an excuse to rush to hers. Clarissa did not appreciate being molested in her PJs after the curtains incident, and that’s when she escaped, planning to hide out for a while and then go be somebody’s gentlewoman companion in America. (I really wish this had taken place, actually. Fan fic opportunity?)

Now Lovelace has tracked her down at her little boardinghouse, where he has somehow, despite her obvious fright at seeing him, convinced the women of the house to help his cause by saying he’s her poor, neglected husband. Is it any wonder I’m having nightmares?

But I think I'm finally understanding why readers liked Lovelace -- he's funny. He just is. He's rude to his pen pals, snide to his family, and afraid of Clarissa's friend like she's the boogeyman in the closet. He's immensely proud of himself, but also touchingly self-aware. It's disconcerting because he's also obviously a big rapey bastard.

Clarrisa’s Faint Count: We’re up to 5. She passed out twice when Lovelace found her at her new lodgings. Can’t blame her.

Update 9/26

Clarissa got out! She did was I was just complaining she hadn't done -- she crawled out the window and hailed a cab. I am so excited!

[5 minutes later]

Aaaaaand Lovelace just found her. Turns out she took that cab to a really obvious place. Oh well. Good effort!

Update 9/25, page 705.

What an action movie would look like if it starred Clarissa.

Evil Villain (locking Clarissa in room): I have you in my power now, Clarissa! You’ll never escape.
Clarissa: Indeed I will. If you don’t unlock the door, I will use this key my maid gave me.
Evil Villain: What?! (Shoots maid, takes key, ties Clarissa to a chair.)
Clarissa: Woe is me!
Evil Villain: Now you’ll never escape.
Clarissa: (Silently works free of the ties, then takes a seat at her writing table.)
Evil Villain: What are you doing?!
Clarissa: Writing a letter about how I’m going to escape.
Evil Villain: Oh, cursed charmer! (Re-ties Clarissa to the chair.)

The back of the book says that, despite Lovelace’s ‘unwelcome and increasingly brutal sexual advances’ (stay tuned, I suppose), Clarissa ‘finds his charm alluring, her scrupulous sense of virtue tinged with unconfessed desire.’ Needless to say, I have not noticed any of this unconfessed desire, except maybe in her repeated inability to make an escape. Is that what her ineffectualness is about? She secretly likes him, and wants to stay? Contemporary readers would have known, I suppose, but I don’t. I can’t tell what would have seemed possible for a woman in this time period (Crawl out the window? Hail a cab?) and I’m constantly trying to read it through that lens. But maybe all this is just flirting?

To catch you up on plot…nah, nevermind. Next time.

Vocabulary that really should come back in style.

Saucebox – a sassy female. I encourage anyone with a teenage daughter to try this word. See what happens.
Fetch – a provocation. See e.g., everything Chelsea Handler says.
Frost Piece – for if you’re ever tempted to call someone an ‘ice queen’ but want to mix it up a little.

Questionable Lesson 5: Save all your letters. What’s the harm? It’s not like Lovelace will sneak into your room and read them or anything like that.



Update 9/12.

On page 529, but hey, who’s counting.

In Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham told us exactly how much money his hero had at all times. When that guy ordered an omelet and a beer, I knew how far it would eat into his total capital. When he took an apartment, I had an informed opinion about whether he could afford it. You would think these mundane details would get boring, but instead they made me more invested in the story.

Something similar must be happening here. You can’t have the finer points of someone’s conduct endlessly re-hashed without developing an opinion, whether you want to or not. In its day, reactions to this book were probably not unlike our endless conversations about Miley Cyrus.

It would be better, though, if we got a little less information -- if we just listened to Clarissa and her friend debate Lovelace’s conduct, and never heard Lovelace’s own explanations -- which the author has thoughtfully footnoted, btw, so that we can refer back to corroborating passages in earlier letters. (Who would flip back and check those?? I have a superstitious fear that if I flip back in this book I’ll have to read my way forward again.) If we didn’t hear Lovelace’s thoughts on the situation, there would be more mystery and danger. With Lovelace weighing in all the time, it feels like every third letter Richardson is giving us the answer to a math problem.

Miscellany:

The only thing Clarissa and her friend (hereafter C&F) fear more than marriage is -- scratch that, they don’t fear anything more than marriage. They view it as the final surrender of the tiny bit of power and control they’ve managed to maintain in their family homes. What’s surprising to me is not that C&F should feel this way, but that it should be so clear. Which is just one more reason I think this book was secretly written by Richardson’s wife.

Clarissa’s friend, in one letter, seems to echo the spirit behind The Game, that shabby memoir/instruction manual about how to pick up girls at bars. “So that, sometimes to make us fear, and even, for a short space, to hate the wretch, is productive of the contrary extreme.” Although I guess in The Game they spent more time insulting girls to attract their attention than inspiring any kind of fear. Fear of herpes, maybe. As I type this I realize I’ve read a lot of stupid shit.

Questionable Lesson 4: Don’t borrow money from your friends, ever.
(I would argue, when someone sends you money so you can escape, don’t send it back on principle. Because now you have no money! Every page of this book is like the scene in a horror movie where the girl walks down the rickety stairs into a dark basement and you’re saying “No! Bad idea!”)

Clarissa’s faint count: Clocking in at 3. She got a mean letter from her sister and passed out twice in a row.


Update 8/30

Did you know that if you google ‘Samuel Richardson’ and ‘Sadomasochism,’ you get results? Actual results, JSTOR results. People are making an academic living hating on this book and here I am doing it for free. They publish, I perish.

Anyway.

Page 467. Clarissa is still stuck at the inn. Turns out that her friend did convince her to marry Lovelace, but he hasn’t proposed in a clear enough way that she could actually say ‘yes.’ Which is intentional on his part, because having got Clarissa in a bad spot, Lovelace would now like to ‘test her virtue’ for some length of time to make sure she really is the angel on earth that he thought he was. How stressing her out further is supposed to prove her ‘purity’ I don’t know, because the one thing this character has never expressed in all her pages of letters is any shred of sexual desire. Or perhaps she did, and I missed it. Having read Pamela, I’m going to set the over-under on ‘number of times Lovelace dresses like her maid and creeps into her bed’ at…oh, I don’t know…3. That only happened twice in Pamela but it was a shorter book.

And, btw, I’m going to read the introduction now. And whatever else I can find. I need a Rosetta Stone for this uneventful epic.

Are you curious what Clarissa looks like? You would only have to wait until page 400 to find out, in a letter that Lovelace writes to his wingman.

She has ringlets. (Which, interestingly, I assumed were blonde, but going back I find that’s not specified.) She has “wax-like flesh” through which “every meandering vein is to be seen in all the lovely parts of her which custom permits to be visible.” And then…the rest of the description is about her outfit. We hear about her “head-dress” (a “Brussels lace mob” with a “sky-blue riband.”) We hear that her coat matches her shoes. (Blue, both.) We hear about the embroidery on her sleeves, “a running pattern of violets and their leaves; the light in the flowers silver; gold in the leaves.”) And apparently she made her muff-glove things, “of her own invention, for she makes and gives fashions as she pleases.” And that is not even all about the clothes – I am leaving stuff out.

Off to sew myself a pair of muff-gloves.


Update 8/21

Last night I saw an ad for the movie Lovelace and I said "That must be about Clarissa!" and J.R. said "No...it's not."

Clarissa is out! She has flown the coop. She snuck out the backyard of her parents' house to meet Lovelace and tell him to go away. After a long, fraught argument about whether she would let him 'enter her garden,' he tricked her into thinking they were about to be caught together, and they jumped into his carriage and raced off.

Somewhere along the line, Clarissa started to like Lovelace, although she doesn't like his reputation. Now she's holed up at an inn she describes only as 'inconvenient,' and methinks she'd be in less danger if she would just agree to marry him, but she won't, because she says her heart is too pure to marry someone of his shady morals. You can't exactly blame her. But it does bring us to our next teachable moment.

Questionable Lesson 3: The lesser of two evils is still too evil.

Whatever happens next, it's bound to be a) bad for poor Clarissa and b) more entertaining than what's gone before. So in this spirit of optimism, I'd like to take a moment to call out some bright spots in the dim landscape of the book's first 379 pages. Richardson's plots are painful, but he does sometimes have a way with words. Here's some vocab.

Flusterations
Anything that makes you blush and flutter your fan.
The man has very ready knees
Kneeling is common. Before its life as a dance floor admonition, 'get low' was apparently a motto for romantic heroes.
'Throbs and glows'
Has there been sex in this book, you ask? Ha. No. This describes a crush.
'Who, I, sir, to find you bowels you naturally have not?'
This is Clarissa asking Solmes if he wants her to grow a pair so he can borrow them.

Clarissa's faint count to date still stands at 1. She's had several near misses, but with the aid of a chair back or a strong arm, she's always recovered. I'm proud of her, really.


Update 8/13

Questionable Lesson 2: Never have an argument just once when you can have it over and over again.

Here is the state of affairs, which has been pretty static for a while.

Lovelace, a known playboy, likes Clarissa. Clarissa doesn’t like Lovelace, but her family really hates him, for reasons that are explained but remain unclear. Because they are afraid Clarissa will marry Lovelace, her mother, father, sister, brother, and countless shitty uncles all try to force her to marry Solmes, whom she likes even less than Lovelace. They say if she refuses to marry Solmes it must be because she secretly likes Lovelace and is plannning to marry him instead. She denies this. And on we go.

Odinarily I’d be tempted to clumsily analyze this convoluted bit of plotting for past notions of women’s rights and perceived agency, but I actually think it’s just a device to force Richardson's main character to run away from home and into compromising situations. Richardson, it should already be clear, is a strange cat. Anyone who can bang this misshapen drum for so long…but, well, I guess that’s why I’m reading, because I already know he’s a weirdo and I’m curious.

Books I could have finished in the 200 pages it has taken me to dutifully wade through Clarissa's letters to date:

The Great Gatsby
The Communist Manifesto
The Stranger
The Old Man and the Sea
Civilization and Its Discontents
Lord of the Flies
Half of the 9/11 Commission Report

Can I please have permission to skip ahead? I think I’m going to skip ahead.


Update 8/8

COURTESY REMINDER: The items listed below are due soon.
PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL.

AUTHOR: Richardson, Samuel,
TITLE: Clarissa, or, The history of a young lady
CALL NO: FIC RICHARDSO
BARCODE: 31454111671535
Fiction DUE: 08-08-13

Ha, ha. I will never return this book. I will keep it around me always, reading a few pages at a time and using it to kill spiders. (It's quite good at that.)

I shouldn't even be updating; I've made ridiculously small progress. On page 130 or so. Clarissa is still writing to her friend and her friend is still writing back. In my defense, the type is quite small, and each page is choking on exclamation points and em dashes. I like a good em dash as much as the next person, but sometimes it's hard to get the sense out of a sentence.

I'm also perhaps paying over-careful attention because in a small way, I can relate to poor Clarissa. I, too, have a friend with whom I obsessively correspond. If the past few pages of the novel were emails between my friend and me, here's how it would go.

Me: I seriously will never marry that guy.
Friend: He's gross.
Me: Now my parents have locked me in my room. Wtf?
Friend: You really need to get control of your inheritance so you can move out.
Me: Yeah, good idea.

It's too soon to tell, but it does not seem that Clarissa is going to heed her friend's advice. Which brings us to what may be the first questionable lesson of Clarissa Explains It All at Great Length.

Questionable Lesson 1: It is better to cry about a problem than to solve it.

Clarissa's faint count to date: 1 and a half. (She almost went down, but someone brought her the smelling salts.)

Update 7/30

I'm on page 80 or so, feeling like I've just taken the first bite of one of those 72 oz steaks at some joint off the interstate where "If you can finish it, it's free!" But I know I voluntarily chose to start the world's longest novel, despite the fact that, as my mother told me, "Nobody reads Clarissa."

I do want you to know that I put this book on my bathroom scale and was surprised to see it weighs only 2 pounds. But its body fat ratio is 38 percent.

So far, all that is happening is that Clarissa is writing to her friend and her friend is writing back. These women are prolific. If television or Candy Crush had been available, this story could never have happened. Also, it seems they live just down the street from each other, so even though I recognize the need for long letters in an epistolary novel, it occurs to me her friend should just come over.

The book reads right now like a classroom note intercepted mid-passage by a junior high teacher, but Richardson is already turning up the heat. Poor, perfect Clarissa has a crappy family, who are all in league against her. I imagine them as having big, scary heads like the characters in that Genesis video. They're literally forcing her to marry this old man in a funny hat, whom she hates. He is vividly described. He doesn't sit, he "squats with his ugly weight." When he's getting ready to propose, he "sets his splay feet in an approaching posture."

When the going gets tough, a Richardson heroine passes out. Clarissa's faint count to date: 1.


7/20/13

I read his earlier work, Pamela, which was so offensive, so disarmingly bizarre, that it was like having an out-of-body experience. It was like being on shrooms. I figure Clarissa could be a good way to recapture that shroomy sensation without having to explain myself to an emergency room doctor. And, since it's an instructional novel of morals and ladylike conduct, I'd like to know if it has anything to say to me across the centuries. Go ahead, Richardson: preach.

Clarissa clocks in at 1533 tissue-thin pages. I have opted to skip the introduction and go in blind, which may be a mistake, given my copy is a blend of the author's three editions and contains footnotes, endnotes, various charts and graphs, and sheet music. (Seriously, sheet music.) Richardson spent almost the entire preface justifying the book's length...maybe because it was the longest novel written in English.

Readers appreciated Clarissa when it was first published. Samuel Johnson, for instance, called it "the first book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart."

But he also said: "If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself."

Here we go.

[David Rain · Rating 5 out of 5]

One may as well admit it at once: this is not a novel everyone will enjoy. Some will find it intolerable. At a million words, it’s the longest novel in the English language, and very slow-moving, perhaps the most slow-moving novel ever written, even considering Proust and The Magic Mountain. It’s hard to read, or at least to start. But once this book grips you, you are gripped. There’s nothing else like it in literature. The sheer narrative power is overwhelming. By the time you’ve finished this book, you’ve lived through emotions as real as life. Reading Clarissa becomes an epoch in your experience.

The story, in its outlines at least, is simple. The Harlowes, a grasping, social-climbing family in eighteenth-century England, decide to force their beautiful daughter Clarissa to marry the repulsive, but very rich, Mr Solmes. Clarissa refuses. The family persecute her, determined to have their way. But meanwhile the handsome, sinister rake, Robert Lovelace, has his eyes on Clarissa. Pretending to be on her side, he persuades her to run away with him. This she does, but only to find herself in a dilemma worse by far. Imprisoned in a brothel in London, Clarissa must fight against Lovelace’s advances. But Lovelace is no ordinary rake. He doesn’t just want to rape Clarissa; he wants to break her will, forcing her to accept him as her lover. Told entirely in the form of letters, this relentless, operatic tragedy is one of the greatest European novels, a masterpiece of characterisation and psychological insight.

[Petra X · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Deserves a great review. If you like Trollope, you'll like Richardson too.

[G.G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an astonishing novel! It has taken me the best part of a year to read Clarissa, yet despite its great length and the fact I knew the outlines of the story before I began, the principal emotion I felt throughout was tension—what would happen next? Richardson is a master at postponement—given the novel’s subject, perhaps we might even call it seduction—spinning things out until suddenly there is resolution and the story moves on.

The first section of the novel, for example, principally an exchange of letters between Clarissa Harlowe and her confidante Anna Howe, is devoted to the attempts of our heroine’s family to force her to marry Roger Solmes, whose lands are contiguous with theirs. Clarissa’s disgust at “the odious Solmes sitting asquat between my mamma and sister… [then] rising and beginning to set his splay feet…in an approaching posture” (Letter 16) is sickeningly believable. Anna’s skewering of what is at stake for a woman contemplating marriage is also sympathetically described: “But to be cajoled, wire-drawn, and ensnared, like silly birds, into a state of bondage or vile subordination; to be courted as princesses for a few weeks, in order to be treated as slaves or the rest of our lives…” (Letter 27) A way out of this deadlock appears in the form of Robert Lovelace, notorious rake, who has begun to pay court to Clarissa. Despite her misgivings, Clarissa confesses to Anna that “I like him better than I ever thought I should like him; and, those faults considered, better perhaps than I ought to like him…were he now but a moral man, I would prefer him to all the men I ever saw.” (Letter 40) Will she elope with him or won’t she? Just when one is fed up with the unending machinations of the Harlowe family, suddenly Clarissa is bundled into Lovelace’s waiting “chariot” and whisked away to London.

In the next section of the novel, Clarissa is imprisoned in the back rooms of a brothel so that Lovelace can begin to batter away at her virtue. Part of his twisted “Rake’s Code” is that a woman must give herself to him of her own accord: “by stratagem, art, and contrivance, [he must] prevail.” (Letter 223) All of Clarissa’s correspondents urge her agree to marry Lovelace as the only way to save her reputation, but this she refuses to do. Finally, Lovelace drugs and rapes her (Letter 257). It is an error that proves fatal to both of them. “What is it of vile that you have not made me?” Clarissa writes (Letter 260); “I shall never be myself again.” (Letter 261) She decides that “…the man who has been the villain to me you have been shall never make me his wife.” (Letter 263)

Despicable though Lovelace is—deceitful, violent, and callous (“when all’s done, Miss Clarissa Harlowe has but run the fate of a thousand others of her sex,” Letter 259)—in the end he is the most interesting character in the novel. As Angus Ross, editor of the edition I read, points out in his Introduction, “the tension between the attractive side of Lovelace and his corrupt and villainous behaviour…is a very powerful one. […] The tension is increased because Richardson has so completely imagined himself into the role of Lovelace that most of his letters are tours-de-force, amusing and skilful.” One slow afternoon at work, I began leafing through Clarissa on the Continent and was fascinated to discover that readers have generally divided into two groups: those who favor Clarissa, and those who favor Lovelace. It was dismaying to find myself in the latter camp.

This is an eighteenth-century novel and so of course Lovelace gets his comeuppance: “Oh that I had been honest!—What a devil are all my plots come to! What do they end in, but one grand plot upon myself, and a title to eternal infamy and disgrace!” he laments. (Letter 285) It is hard to feel much sympathy for him, until this: “Having lost her, my whole soul is a blank: the whole creation round me, the elements above, beneath, and everything I behold (for nothing can I enjoy) is a blank without her.” (Letter 321) Perhaps what irks him the most is that he can no longer control her: “Can she be any man’s but mine? Will I be any woman’s but hers? I never will! I never can!” (Letter 350) But Clarissa has escaped his clutches and determines her own end: “I have much more pleasure in thinking of death, than of such a husband,” she writes to Anna Howe (Letter 359).

Clarissa’s end is hard for us moderns to take—finding herself pregnant (so Lovelace believes: see Letter 371, and Clarissa’s exchange with her uncle, Letters 402-3) she gives every appearance of willing herself to die. Her properly Christian death, described to Lovelace (Letter 481) is beautifully done. For a time, Lovelace is unrepentant: “Surely nobody will dispute my right to her. Whose was she living? Whose is she dead, but mine?” (Letter 497) But after a time he too appears to throw his life away, in a duel with Clarissa’s cousin, expressly forbidden in her last letters to them both.

In the end, I found Clarissa a haunting tale; but perhaps that is the case with any long novel one lives with for months on end. Still, I have the feeling that I will return to this one. It really is a masterpiece that all lovers of English literature should read at least once in their lives.

[Vanessa Wu · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of nonsense is talked about Clarissa. It's essentially a rape fantasy, ending in the death of the victim. Condense it down to 60,000 words, stick a distressed nude on the cover and, if it isn't banned, it would sell like hot cakes on Amazon.

According to Lord Macaulay, once entered in Clarissa, you are infected by her and can't leave off for a minute.

On the other hand, says Samuel Johnson, if you were to read this for the story you would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself.

So, there you are. Rape, murder, galloping gonorrhea and suicide.

So much for "Virtue Rewarded."

What do you think?

This story is nearly a million words long, so I always give a copy at Christmas to people who I don't want to meet again for a while.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was vaguely aware of this as one of the early British novels, around the time of Pamela. And then, about a year ago, a friend was talking about it on Twitter, and how it takes place over a little less than a year, and was the first epistolary novel. So you can read it in "real time," as it were, and I became obsessed. I wanted to try this challenge! I did have some issues keeping up during the summer. Some of the letters are very long, and some of them loop back- there will be a letter dated July 7th, but that contains copies of letters from June, for example- but it was a real ride, I must say!

Clarissa Harlowe is an Incomparable: beautiful, accomplished, intelligent, and saintly.

And literally everyone else around her is trash. Absolute trash. She's got terrible parents, a bitchy sister, and a controlling bastard of a brother who is attempting to auction her off to their neighbor in order to enhance his own property and to punish her for being their grandfather's favorite and sole beneficiary. Enter Mr. Lovelace, a rake (and piece of total trash), who provides her with a way out.

Sort of.

I shall say no more that will spoil it, but I will say I was shocked, SHOCKED I say! I always think of old British novels as being overly mannered and coy. "A Man touched my ungloved Hand, and I am RUINED." It's why I will admit to preferring Jane Eyre to Pride and Prejudice. Jane and Rochester are like, making out in the bushes, and I applaud their passion!


But, at the risk of sounding like Bill Hader's Stefon, this book had everything: young girls being roofied, arson, seduction, unwed pregnancies, bribery, two hookers impersonating nobility, duels, forgery, and a seventeen year old girl being arrested by like, four armed policemen, for failing to pay the bill at the whorehouse where she was being kept prisoner! Just completely bonkers!

Was it too long? Maybe.

Did I wish that her brother and sister would be trampled by wild horses while Clarissa watched and calmly drank some tea? Yes.

Do I think this is a must read classic for everyone? Nah.

But I did like it, and I could see myself "taking the challenge" again in a few years!

[BAM doesn’t answer to her real name · Rating 3 out of 5]

The narrator on LibriVox is terrible! I’m pushing through this about a couple hours every morning because I enjoy the letter format, but I may reread this e-copy next year.

[Martin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Our long national nightmare is over. After two months of sheer torture, I'm finally free, and it is good to know that I can never have a worse reading experience as long as I live. It isn't possible. Why do I say that? Because this is the longest novel in the English language (by words: 969,000), and even if something sucks as hard, I won't have to deal with it for so long. And besides, the long novels I know are on my horizon due to my 1,001 Book Reading Project are more likely than not to be of higher quality, because, seriously, how can it get worse than this?

It was so awful, I had to resort to audibooks to absorb it all, so my daily treadmill runs, which I enjoy immensely, fatigued me to death as the narrator droned on.

How dreadful was the audibook material? I swear, on multiple occasions, the reader yawned. I'm not kidding. That's how bad it was.

Clearly, what Richardson was trying to do was to take his original piece-of-crap epistolary novel, Pamela, and amp it up with more complexity and intrigue. Problem is: he filled it up with a family of assholes and pyschosexual torture. Who finds this entertaining? Certainly not me. The introduction of the book actually claims this is Richardson's masterpiece. Ha! I'll be the judge of that! I declare that it is about as far from a masterpiece as any piece of literature can be. I call it a disasterpiece, and as such, it is the greatest disasterpiece of them all.

It was a complete waste of my time, but I'm committed to my project, and because of the depth of the misery of experiencing this trashpile, I feel it's all downhill from here. Wheeeee!

[Justin Pickett · Rating 4 out of 5]

“When, when … will this sweet lady’s sufferings be at an end?”

Unbearably suspenseful and devastating. In this novel, Samuel Richardson takes readers to the “house of mourning” to force upon them expanded empathy, the religious doctrine of future rewards, and a fear of misused parental authority. The story begins with a family that is “too rich to be either humble, considerate, or contended,” wherein there are three siblings, two of whom are hard-hearted, envious, and conniving. These two turn everyone else—their parents, uncles, and even servants—against the youngest, the virtuous Clarissa Harlowe, who is but a teenager. Demanding absolute obedience, they subject her to cruelty in an effort to coerce a marriage to a man she detests (Mr. Roger Solmes); she is laughed at, demeaned, cursed, “watched, banished, and confined.”

“They will ruin the flower and ornament of their family.”

All the while, the entire Harlowe family is but a puppet on strings to a violent, sociopathic, eater of women, Robert Lovelace, who is using their wonton cruelty to drive Clarissa into his hands. He sets everything in motion, goading on Clarissa’s cruel brother and sister, as a grand plot to isolate and control her, and, with the help of a confederate in the Harlowe house, carries it off, tearing apart the family.

“I had torn up the tree by the roots to come at the fruit.”

Mr. Lovelace is the leader of a gang of libertines, and is “the vilest and most selfish of seducers.” This rake’s “predominant passion” is outwitting and ruining girls; he denies that women have souls and takes delight in their tears. And he is the worst kind of villain—rich, handsome, brave, skilled in fighting, intelligent, educated (he quotes Dryden, Cowley, Horace, Ovid, Rowe, Shakespeare, etc.), prideful, immoral, remorseless, and vengeful.

“I have vowed to revenge upon as many of the sex as shall come into my power.”

“I can put her to trials as mortifying to her niceness, as glorious to my pride … I would shew her no mercy.”



Lovelace eventually imprisons Clarissa in a hellish house where he and his coconspirators subject her to repeated deceptions and schemes, all aimed at ruining her (e.g., setting a fire to get into her bedroom). These are described in letters written between two sets of friends. First, Clarissa and her friend, Miss Anna Howe, write to each other. At this point, Anna is the only person Clarissa has left in the world. Mr. Lovelace also writes to his friend, John Belford, openly admitting all his evil plans and deeds. In Lovelace’s letters to Mr. Belford, his sociopathic character is revealed clearly.

“O Lovelace, you are Satan himself.”

“What pleasure should I have in breaking such a spirit! I should wish for her but for one month, I think. She would be too tame and spiritless for me after that. How sweetly pretty to see the two lovely friends, when humbled and tame, both sitting in the darkest corner of a room, arm in arm, weeping and sobbing for each other!—and I their emperor, their then acknowledged emperor, reclined at my ease in the same room, uncertain to which I should first, grand signor like, throw out my handkerchief!”

As an aside, Mr. Belford is the novel’s most dynamic character, having the sharpest arc. At one point, he uses “reformation-schemes” (e.g., hiring an older, virtuous housekeeper), which modern behavioral economists would call “commitment devices,” to facilitate behavioral change, without which failure would be exceedingly likely:

“Thou hast made good resolutions. If thou keepest them not, thou wilt never be able to keep any … Were it only that thou hast resolved, six to one thou failest.”

There are a lot of poems included in the letters in this novel. Most of which I had never read before. One of which, “Ode to Wisdom,” was written by a woman in the early 1700s, and was included without a citation to the author (Elizabeth Carter). I loved this excerpt from it:

“To me thy better gifts impart,
Each moral beauty of the heart,
By studious thought refin’d;
For wealth, the smile of glad content;
for pow’r, its amplest, best extent,
An empire o’er my mind.”

Modern scholars (e.g., Lynn Hunt, Steven Pinker) have argued that 18th Century epistolary novels like this and Pamela played a major role in the Humanitarian Revolution—that is, in expanding the circle of empathy over the last few centuries and fostering the resulting rise of humanism in society. It is clear that Samuel Richardson had a similar purpose in mind when writing this novel.

“But let me beg of thee … to be—to be human, that’s all—only, that thou wouldst not disgrace our common humanity!”

OTHER MEMORABLE QUOTES:

“Deeds are to me the only evidence of intentions.”

“For what are words, but the body and dress of thought?”

“Great faults and great virtues are often found in the same person.”

“Let tongue and eyes express what they will … the first reading of a will, where a person dies worth anything considerable, generally affords a true test of the relations’ love to the deceased.”

“Marriage is the highest state of friendship, it lessens our cares, by dividing them, at the same time that it doubles our pleasures by a mutual participation.”

“Encouragement and approbation make people show talents they were never suspected to have … That persecution and discouragement depress ingenious minds, and blunt the edge of lively imaginations.”

“Give me leave, Sir—but I may venture to say, that many of those who have escaped censure, have not merited applause.”

“Grief mollifies, and enervates. The grieved mind looks round it, silently implores consolation, and loves the soother. Grief is ever an inmate with joy.”

“Nor can there be a greater sign of want of merit, than where a man seeks to pull down another’s character, in order to build up his own.”

“Men of talents … are sooner to be convinced by short sentences than by long preachments, because the short sentences drive themselves into the heart and stay there, while long discourses, though ever so good, tire the attention; and one good thing drives out another, and so on till all is forgotten.”

“[T]he little words in the republic of letters, like t he little folks in a nation, are the most significant. The trisyllables, and the rumblers of syllables more than three, are but the good-for-little magnates.”

“[A]nger converts what would be pity, without it, into resentment.”

“[B]ut you know, Sir, where self is judge, matters, even with good people, will not always be rightly judged of.”

“And yet, in my opinion, the world is but one great family. Originally it was so. What then is this narrow selfishness that reigns in us, but relationship remembered against relationship forgot?”

“How do needless watchfulness and undue restraint produce artifice and contrivance!”

“An honest man, perhaps thou’lt say, will not wish to have it in his power to do hurt. He ought not, let me tell him; for, if he have it, a thousand to one but it makes him both wanton and wicked.”

“So let them fret on, grumble and grudge, and accumulate; and wondering what ails them that they have not happiness when they have riches, think the cause is want of more; and so go on heaping up, till Death, as greedy an accumulator as themselves, gathers them into his garner.”

“Let me take the liberty further to observe, that the principal end of a young man’s education at the university, is, to learn him to reason justly, and to subdue the violence of his passions.”

“But it is a strange perverseness in human nature that we slight that when near us which at a distance we wish for.”

“One fault, willfully committed, authorizes the imputation of many more.”

“There is but one pride pardonable; that of being above doing a base or dishonourable action.”

“But you need not be told that a libertine man of sense does infinitely more mischief than a libertine of weak parts is able to do.”

“A libertine … a plotting, an intriguing libertine, must be generally remorseless—unjust he must always be.”

“But I used then to say, and I still am of opinion, that he wants a heart: and if he does, he wants every thing. A wrong head may be convinced, may have a right turn given it; but who is able to give a heart, if a heart be wanting?”

“That to excel in theory, and to excel in practice, generally required different talents; which did not always meet in the same person.”

“Your merit is your crime. You can no more change your nature, than your persecutors can theirs. Your distress is owing to the vast disparity between you and them.”

“Guard your eye: ‘twill every be in a combination against your judgment. If there are two parts to be taken, it will be for ever traitor as it is, taking the wrong one.”

“The devil always baits with a pretty wench, when he angles for a man, be his age, rank, or degree, what it will.”

“What friends does prosperity make! What enemies adversity!”

“O my dear! what a degree of patience, what a greatness of soul, is required in the wife, not to despise a husband who is more ignorant, more illiterate, more low-minded than herself!”

“Threateners, where they have an opportunity to put in force their threats, were seldom to be feared.”

“True love was fearful of offending.”

“[A] man who, although he admires her person, is still more in love with the graces of her mind. And as those graces are improvable with every added year of life, which will impair the transitory ones of person, what a firm basis … has [he] chosen to build his love upon!”

“Nay, in the very courts of justice, does not character acquit or condemn as often as facts, and sometimes even in spite of facts?”

“The guilty, I believe, in every case, less patiently bear the detecting truth, than the innocent do the degrading falsehood.”

“Are not provocations and temptations the tests of virtue?”

“Is not the man guilty of a high degree of injustice, who is more apt to give contradiction, than able to bear it?”

“Nothing but experience can give us a strong and efficacious conviction of this difference; and when we would inculcate the fruits of that upon the minds of those we love, who have not lived long enough to find those fruits; and would hope, that our advice should have as much force upon them, as experience has upon us … should we not proceed by patient reasoning and gentleness, that we may not harden, where we would convince? For, Madam, the tenderest and most generous minds, when harshly treated, become generally the most inflexible.”

“How I love these reasoning ladies!—‘Tis all over with them when once love has crept into their hearts; for then will they employ all their reasoning powers to excuse rather than to blame the conduct of the doubted lover, let appearances against him be ever so strong.”

“Who is it in this mortal life that wealth does not mislead? … were it not for the poor and the middling, the world would probably, long ago, have been destroyed by fire from Heaven.”

“The hint of least moment, as you may imagine it, is often pregnant with events of the greatest.”

“Nothing but experience can give us a strong and efficacious conviction of this difference; and when we would inculcate the fruits of that upon the minds of those we love, who have not lived long enough to find those fruits; and would hope, that our advice should have as much force upon them, as experience has upon us … should we not proceed by patient reasoning and gentleness, that we may not harden, where we would convince? For, Madam, the tenderest and most generous minds, when harshly treated, become generally the most inflexible.”

“A man to love praise, yet to be content to draw it from such contaminated springs!”

“Haughty spirits, when convinced that they have carried resentments too high, want but a good excuse to condescend.”

“There is no such thing as perfect happiness here, since the busy mind will make to itself evils, were it to find none.”

“[S]ince traveling is certainly the best physic for all those disorders which owe their rise to grief or disappointment.”

“Nor had I at another time any mercy upon the daughter of an old epicure, who had taught the girl, without the least remorse, to roast lobsters alive; to cause a poor pig to be whipt to death; to scrape carp the contrary way of the scales, making them leap in the stew-pan … Many more instances of the like nature could I give, were I to leave nothing to thyself, to shew that the best take the same liberties, and perhaps worse, with some sort of creatures, that we take with others; all creatures still! And creatures too, as I have observed above, replete with strong life, and sensible feeling!”

“For what is even the long life which in high health we wish for? What, but, as we go along, a life of apprehension, sometimes for our friends, oftener for ourselves? And at last, when arrived at the old age we covet, one heavy loss or deprivation having succeeded another, we see ourselves stript, as I may say, of every one we loved; and find ourselves exposed, as uncompanionable poor creatures, to the slights, to the contempts, of justling youth, who want to push off the stage, in hopes to possess what we have:—and, superadded to all, our own infirmities every day increasing; of themselves enough to make the life we wished for the greatest disease of all!”

“It has always been a rule with me, in my little donations, to endeavor to aid and set forward the sober and industrious poor. Small helps, if seasonably afforded, will do for such; and so the fund may be of more extensive benefit; an ocean of wealth will not be sufficient for the idle and dissolute…”

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let's be clear about this: this book is far, far too long for modern reading habits. Not all that much happens in its 1500 pages (pages which are, I would guess, maybe one and a half to twice as long as normal pages). If you want to read it, don't sit down and try to read the whole thing straight. It's really not that much fun. I heard somewhere that in the 18th century people treated books the way we treat TV programs: pick it up, put it down, come in in the middle, have a conversation while you're reading it etc... No need to read it through in a handful of sittings, pondering every last word.

That said, it's a pretty good story, and great for academics, of which I am one. This might be *the* novel of modernity. It's all here: issues of sexuality; issues of independence and autonomy; the odd relationship between the nobility and the newly arriving bourgeoisie; the role of religion in all of this; bizarre accounting practices (tell me again how many minutes a day Clarissa spent at her various tasks?) And it's a masterpiece in literary terms as well. Richardson's prose is lovely, and the main characters all have distinct voices and personalities; he plays around with his narrative in very interesting ways and stretches the epistolary novel to its bursting point. He is to epistolary novels as Wagner is to classical music. The difference is that people generally find what came after Wagner to be unlistenable, whereas what came after Richardson - especially from Austen forward - is far, far more readable and enjoyable.

Not sure why anyone would read this, though, unless they had an interest in literary history, or the type of personality which just wants to do the hardest thing out there. If you just want a good story about a virtuous young woman (no shame in that), I don't know, maybe try the BBC mini-series version.

[Lorna]

I only managed half. The series of unfortunate events was so relentless. I took a break thinking I would come back to it but on reflection I couldn't face it. It is addictive but hard on the mental health.

[Squib · Rating 4 out of 5]

Make no mistake, this is 1494 pages of Clarissa declaring, “Indeed, indeed, I never can marry thee (vilest of wretches)!” And yet, and yet it’s weirdly compelling although I think it loses momentum around page 1359 and becomes plaguy preachy. This is Extreme Unrequited Love, 18th century epistolary style with enough scandal and froth to make it an easy holiday read

Few favourite quotes:

“I do assure thee, Jack, that thou less deservest praise than an horse-pond…” (Lovelace)

“And I believe that anatomists allow that women have more watery heads than men.” (Lovelace)

“Only that all men are monkeys more or less, or else that you and I should have such baboons as these to choose out of is a mortifying thing, my dear.” (Anna Howe)

“I have excellent gloves and wash-balls, madam; rappee, Scots, Portugal, and all sorts of snuff.” (Lovelace)

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am thrilled at the prospect of completing this novel. I've read a great deal of fiction and this - the longest novel ever written, I believe, - is better than much of it. It is so subtle, so complete in its awareness of gender and human nature; the syntax and style seems to anticipate what I love in Henry James, that I will be sorry when it is done and I have to bid farewell to Lovelace, Harlowe and company, above all their magnificent correspondence. This novel to end or begin all novels asks so many questions is fired with great moral purpose. Like Shakespeare, Richardson sees all and anticipates all of our second guesses only to transcend them. I recommend it for anyone under any fashionable spell that the dilemma of gender admits of any answers, easy or otherwise.

It is June 20th and I have finally finished this extraordinary novel. Not enough good can be said about it. Lovelace and Harlowe represent all the best and worst in their respective genders and yet, though the strictures of their world are fierce, their fates are wholly due to their natures and characters: it cannot sufficiently be blamed on larger forces or social structures. Again, as in Shakespeare, character is supreme above all. Reading Richardson is like reading the fully uncensored drama of the male and female sexes in all of its complexity and ultimately its mystery. Richardson cannot be pigeonholed: he is wary of human perfectibility to not be unlike the tories and yet is as merciless in his attack upon what the traditional patriarchal family structure does to women as any twentieth century female and feminist author. And yet...Richardson is but a beginning. An introduction, an invitation to reflect upon our lives in their whole. What do you think, dear reader??

[Abyssdancer (Hanging in there!) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, I can’t believe I actually, finally finished this book! This is the longest book I have ever read … and I have to say, for the most part, it was very enjoyable … the characters were quite complex, the plot twists exciting, for the most part … but sometimes this story teetered on the brink of melodrama ….

Clarissa Harlowe is a young wealthy English woman who has just inherited a large fortune from her deceased grandfather … however, her older brother and older sister have conspired with a potential suitor for Clarissa, Mr. Solmes, who will take over the inheritance from Clarissa and distribute funds to all of Clarissa’s family members … from the beginning, Clarissa is repulsed by Mr. Solmes, and refuses to marry him … she is confined to her room, but she is able to send letters to her best friend, Anna Howe, who lives a few miles away, and a secret ardent suitor, Mr. Lovelace … Clarissa doesn’t much like Mr. Lovelace either, but after being forced to let Mr. Solmes court her, she is tricked into escaping her family with Mr. Lovelace, and so begins her nightmarish experiences in London that try her perfect virtue and isolate her from her family …

This book is told as an epistolary, wherein the narrative is crafted as a series of letters written by several different characters … the story focuses mostly on the letters between Clarissa and Anna, and between Mr. Lovelace and Mr. Belford, his best friend … the author amazed me with his ability to create such unique voices for each of the characters, even for the supporting characters … such a format brought an immediacy to the story lines, and such depth to the characters …

At the beginning, I really liked the character of Clarissa … this is the mid-1700s, and Clarissa is standing up herself against her family and Mr.Solmes … she is a talented writer and has perfected the artform of the letter as she writes assiduously to Anna and various family members about her refusal to marry the suitor chosen by her family … true to her age (18 years old), she acts rashly and escapes to London with the seductive Mr. Lovelace … then she refuses to marry Mr. Lovelace as well, especially after the torment she endures at his will … but midway through the story, she becomes the blessed angelic paragon of virtue that all women must aspire to and all men should adore … the girl does no wrong - she goes to church 3-4 times a day to pray, she prays all the time in the boarding house where she lives as she tries to reconcile with her family … all the characters beatify her virtue and thoughtfulness … all this as she is dying from what I’m never quite sure … she languishes for several months and suffers convulsions and muscle weakness for something that would probably never come up in a Web MD diagnosis … for three volumes (out of nine) I was waiting her to just die all ready … I kept thinking of the Seinfeld episode where Elaine hates The English Patient and she exclaims, “stop telling your story and just die!” … however, the character of Mr. Lovelace the demonic Lothario fascinated me, despite the fact that he truly was an evil little devil … but base and wicked I understand … this whole virtuous Clarissa thang threw the whole story from tragedy to melodrama, even though the author pleads his case in a postscript that the story truly is a tragedy …

So, I’ve been sick with Covid for the last three weeks, and Clarissa and I kind of languished in bed at the same time … so, I guess what I want to say, is that if you’re wallowing in the filth of a cruel virus, this book might be the one for you … I’ve been reading this book the whole time I had Covid, and I still enjoyed it … I feel blessed that I did not need to be hospitalized, and that my family was so supportive during my recovery … but what truly got me through the throes of Covid was that I didn’t want to die without finishing this dammed book! And I succeeded - I recovered from Covid, and I finished reading Clarissa!

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je9l5...

Four part TV series from 1991. It didn't make me change my star rating any, yet was enjoyable enough to view.

[Hon Lady Selene · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is…. remarkably particular. One of the longest reads of the English language, an attempt to a proper review is redundant, it delving into heavy themes of individual versus society, the rewards of virtue and gender equality, rape, punishment of evil, mental and physical abuse, liberation though death etc but it would have had to have been [:D] at least 800 pages shorter for my full approval. If Samuel Richardson wrote as an exercise in the longest epistolary novel, then the book is a massive success.

A favourite author of Jane Austen and Ann Radcliffe who was noticeably inspired by Clarrisa to produce (the much more low-key) The Mysteries of Udolpho, but their heroines have a happier ending. Clarrisa is a True Tragedy, a story of horrors where one would welcome the ghosts. And since I described Radcliffe’s Montoni as being sadistic, what word can be used to describe Lovelace? Disgusting. Abhorrent.

At the end of this novel, Clarissa’s friend is collecting the letters that tell her story so that it can be an example to protect other women from similar fates. This resonates across the novel, in particular in the letters of Mrs. Howe (Mary Sue?), there is a deep sense that Samuel Richardson was much aware and (this reader wishes to hope) empathetic of the Shameful, distressing, inequitable and discriminatory approach of society towards its women, as follows from letters of Mrs. Howe:

“I suppose it is the way of this [male] sex to endeavour to entangle the thoughtless of ours by bold supposes and offers, in hopes that we shall be too complaisant or bashful to quarrel with them and, if not checked, to reckon upon out silence as assents voluntarily given or concessions made in their favour.”

“To be courted as princesses for a few weeks in order to be treated as slaves for the rest of their lives.”

This book was published in 1748, with almost a million words. The full title of the book is Clarissa: Or, The History of a Young Lady: Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life; and Particularly Shewing the Distresses that May Attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children, in Relation to Marriage.

[RA Sci-Fi · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's Clarissa. There's no loving it, there's no hating it. There's only sitting there with mingled feelings of frustration, awe, and utter exhaustion.

I think any serious student of literature needs to read this novel, and not because I'm into reinforcing canonical BS, but because it really is a phenomenal achievement that ought to be read, discussed, written about, and more. I think feminist critics especially would find this an important read to consider. But I think beyond that---you really probably shouldn't read this unless you're (a) really ambitious and want to read one of the longest novels in the English language or (b) really into eighteenth-century literature--like really into it.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

"I cannot go on."

Frankly, for how often people in this novel write this, the reader themselves may find themselves staring at the 1,400+ tightly-packed remaining pages in horror, and thinking, if only you bloody hadn't.

No, I did not read it all. I think my abridgement probably totalled over 1,00 pages though, which, in three days, is not bad. I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed this once I started. It's a surprisingly modern novel in many ways; though Clarissa may be a perfect, luminous "angel" - aren't many of the eighteenth-century heroines? - Richardson spares no blushes in his totalling of Clarissa's treatment and the novel was bizarrely addictive. It's thrilling in places, Clarissa is no passive fool, and the dialogue sparkles between Clarissa and her best friend, Anna, and particularly Clarissa and the horrible Lovelace, a preening, self-indulgent, narcissistic villain of whom writers of twenty-first century psychological thrillers would be proud. It really does feel like a pioneering classic in places, stretching its use of form and Richardson's talents.

Until it pushes its conceit too far. After the immediate fallout from Lovelace's sexual assault of Clarissa, the novel just seems to run out of steam, a sad thing given that there were still at least 500 pages to go. I read an abridgement of the Penguin edition that my supervisor recommended and, despite missing out chunks of the text, when Belford repented his actions and Clarissa levelled up so completely in sainthood that one could be forgiven for expecting her to suddenly grow wings at any moment, it seemed like I had missed absolutely nothing. (Unlike earlier in the text, where I could tell that I was missing nuances of the plot by skipping letters.)

Nevertheless, I'm giving this one 4 stars because...it's the classic, okay? I enjoyed this one a lot more - and read it a hell of a lot faster - than Richardson's other novel, Pamela, despite the fact that Pamela is about 1/3 of the length (still no mean feat - you will wonder if anybody in the eighteenth century experienced hand cramp.) In many ways, they could almost be two different variants on the same story, both featuring a virtuous young woman being pursued by a rakish and seemingly unreliable potential lover. However, while Pamela is stilted, dry, dull, and slow, Clarissa is dark, mesmerising, and fluent in its sustained skill. Its main dark topic - rape - is handled with a sensitivity, comprehension, and quiet devastation that many modern authors could learn from. Am I really giving 4 stars to a book for it not being Pamela? Yes. Yes, I am.

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm currently reading this for the third (!) time. The first time I read it, I was in an online reading group that read it over many months, reading each letter on the date it is supposed to be written on (so starting on 10 January and ending on 18 December). I mentioned this to a class of mine, in which we were reading work by eighteenth-century British women, and a few of them decided they wanted to do this, too (and a pandemic seems like a good time for it!), so we're reading it together over 2021. They're reading it for the first time, of course, and I am eagerly awaiting their responses as we progress. (so far they really, really hate Clarissa's brother--and who could blame him? he's contemptible)

[John Purcell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa : Or the History of a Young Lady is one of the greatest works ever penned, possibly even the greatest ever…. (Yes, even greater than Shakespeare!)

But at over 1536 exquisite, finely wrought pages I know it is not for everyone…

If you like the best this world can offer and if you are willing to devote your full attention to the product of an exceptional genius then Clarissa : Or the History of a Young Lady is the book for you.