Afraid that they will force her to marry Solmes and manipulated by a less than wholly truthful Lovelace, she panics and runs off with her dashing admirer. Here the novel takes a turn. Clarissa and Lovelace seem at first to be, like Pamela and Mr. B, a familiar if well-rendered example of a virtuous woman and a marriage-resistant playboy, but their fully elaborated inner worlds begin to transform them into beings far more ambiguous. Clarissa vacillates between attraction to and moral revulsion toward Lovelace, who is as slippery a character as fiction has produced.
Of his designs, Clarissa knows less than the reader—who has access to his letters to Belford—but she picks up on things all the same. She writes to Anna:. He says too many fine things of me, and to me. True respect, true value, I think lies not in words. The silent awe, the humble, the doubting eye, and even the hesitating voice, better shew it. The man indeed at times is all upon the ecstatic; one of his phrases. But, to my shame and confusion, I must say, that I know too well to what to attribute his transports.
In one word, it is to his triumph. Clarissa is in a mortifyingly dependent position. She needs Lovelace to marry her for the sake of her reputation. Clarissa would be both furious and humiliated if she knew to what extent Lovelace is torn between his real tenderness for her and his baser impulses. No random twists of fate, no plots set in motion by jealous rivals keep the lovers apart; even the disapproving parents have been sidelined. The only obstacles to their happiness are the ones they create themselves.
My Penguin Classics edition—at 1, pages—dwarfs the other paperbacks on my shelf, more like a phone book than like a novel. Even its most ardent admirers tend to concede that some sections are overlong. They give occasion. One wonders if he was arguing with himself—searching for a justification for not having had the wherewithal to take a scalpel to his own work.
B had ostensibly been imposed on him by the true story he remembered and sought to re-create. With Lovelace, Richardson aimed to introduce a rake so chilling as to set women straight about these kinds of men. Grandison is handsome, brave, and kind to women and the poor. And yet, Clarissa finds his charm alluring, her scrupulous sense of virtue tinged with unconfessed desire. Told through a complex series of interweaving letters, Clarissa is a richly ambiguous study of a fatally attracted couple and a work of astonishing power and immediacy.
A huge success when it first appeared in , and translated into French and German, it remains one of the greatest of all European novels. In his introduction, Angus Ross examines characterization, the epistolary style, the role of the family and the position of women in Clarissa.
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Samuel Richardson was born in Derbyshire in , the son of a London joiner. He received little formal education and in was apprenticed to a printer in the capital. Thirteen years later he set up for himself as a… More about Samuel Richardson. Start earning points for buying books!
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Daniel Deronda. George Eliot. The Mill on the Floss. The Return of the Native. 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!
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 offence , 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.
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 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 submis 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.
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. 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. 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. View all 15 comments. Sep 14, J rated it did not like it. 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. Samuel Richardson should be boycotted out of the Canon.
Wolstonecraft kicked his ass. Apr 07, Paul rated it liked it Shelves: 18th-novels. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.
To view it, click here. This is a massive book, over a million words; 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. View all 6 comments. May 22, Roman Clodia rated it really liked it. 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 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 t 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 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 or so pages and the last 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. The affair is over. Clarissa lives. 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.
View all 9 comments. Jul 20, Kate is currently reading it. And I seem to have run up against it. Continued here.
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. 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. I really wish this had taken place, actually. Fan fic opportunity? 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.
She passed out twice when Lovelace found her at her new lodgings. She did was I was just complaining she hadn't done -- she crawled out the window and hailed a cab. I am so excited! Turns out she took that cab to a really obvious place. Oh well. Good effort! 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! Clarissa : Indeed I will. Evil Villain : What?! Shoots maid, takes key, ties Clarissa to a chair. Clarissa : Woe is me!
Clarissa : Silently works free of the ties, then takes a seat at her writing table. Evil Villain : What are you doing?! Evil Villain : Oh, cursed charmer! Re-ties Clarissa to the chair. Is that what her ineffectualness is about? She secretly likes him, and wants to stay? Hail a cab? 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. Questionable Lesson 5 : Save all your letters. 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. In its day, reactions to this book were probably not unlike our endless conversations about Miley Cyrus.
Who would flip back and check those?? With Lovelace weighing in all the time, it feels like every third letter Richardson is giving us the answer to a math problem.
Fear of herpes, maybe. Because now you have no money! Bad idea! She got a mean letter from her sister and passed out twice in a row. People are making an academic living hating on this book and here I am doing it for free. They publish, I perish. Page Clarissa is still stuck at the inn. Or perhaps she did, and I missed it.
That only happened twice in Pamela but it was a shorter book. 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 to find out, in a letter that Lovelace writes to his wingman. She has ringlets. Blue, both. Off to sew myself a pair of muff-gloves. 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 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. This describes a crush. 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. Here is the state of affairs, which has been pretty static for a while. Lovelace, a known playboy, likes Clarissa. 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. Richardson, it should already be clear, is a strange cat. 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 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.
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.
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. 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.
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