Samuel Richardson's Clarissa

Is not the space from sixteen to twenty-one that which requires this care more than any time of a young woman's life?  For in that period do we not generally attract the eyes  of the other sex, and become the subject of their addresses, and not seldom of their attempts?  And is not that the period in which our conduct or misconduct gives us a reputation or disreputation that almost inseparably accompanies us throughout our whole future lives?
Miss Clarissa Harlowe to Miss Howe, Clarissa

...there was frequently a necessity to be very circumstantial and minute in order to preserve and maintain that air of probability which is necessary to be maintained in a story designed to represent real life and which is rendered extremely busy and active by the plots and contrivances formed and carried on by one of the principal characters.
Samuel Richardson, Postscript, Clarissa

Clarissa is the story of a young woman of outstanding kindness, virtue and intelligence who's made to suffer under a violently oppressive family, is tricked away from home by a notorious sexual predator, deceived, imprisoned, persecuted, drugged and raped, and finally impelled to her death.
Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa


Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Clarissa was published in 1748 and seems to be seldom read today.  I suppose in this day and age when even Trollope, Dickens and Eliot are not read that much it's asking a great deal for someone to read a 2200 page (Everyman's Library) or 1500 page (Penguin) book.  In my case I read the copy I bought at The Gotham Book Mart in the 70's when I worked as a guard at the post office at night while waiting for mail trucks to arrive.  I think the bigger problem is that people have a hard time these days immersing themselves in the past, when the world in many ways was very different.  To my mind this is one of the great pleasures of reading, especially the novels of the 18th Century, when novels were less structured and orderly, more sprawling and picaresque. Clarissa's plot is quite simple and the beauty of it lies more in the descriptions of feelings and emotions. In a sense the plot is also rather repetitive, with the same scenes described in letters by different people.  Of course this is part of the elegance of the epistolary method:  the same incident is viewed in subtly different ways by the different participants.  Terry Eagleton has made a fairly persuasive case for the feminist and class-conscious elements of Richardson's novel but I think that can limit as much as it can expand its appeal; in the end it is the style, the emotions, the insights into another time, that matter.