Product Description

Pressured by her unscrupulous family to marry a wealthy man she detests, the young Clarissa Harlowe is tricked into fleeing with the witty and debonair Robert Lovelace and places herself under his protection. Lovelace, however, proves himself to be an untrustworthy rake whose vague promises of marriage are accompanied by unwelcome and increasingly brutal sexual advances. 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 1747, and translated into French and German, it remains one of the greatest of all European novels.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54064 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1536 pages

About the Author
Samuel Richardson (1689 - 1761) was born in Derbyshire, the son of a joiner. He received little formal education and in 1706 was apprenticed to a printer in London. Thirteen years later he set himself up as a stationer and printer and became of the leading figures in the trade. He printed political material, newspapers and literature. He began writing Pamela as a result of a suggestion from friends that he should compile a book of model letters for use by unskilled writers. Pamela was a great success and went on to write Clarissa, one of the masterpieces of European literature. Angus Ross is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He writes on eighteenth-century and other literature and has edited Swift as well as a number of anthologies.

Customer Reviews

Not a book to be read in abridgement--be patient!
Once you've read this book, you can barely read anything written in England post-1750 without finding and feeling Richardson's influence. An English epic, a sometimes infuriatingly detailed exploration of men and women under pressure, a masterfully crafted depiction of bewilderment, betrayal, and the kind of religious ecstasy that's difficult to read. Don't miss Letter 246. Stay with this book, even if it takes you weeks (it took me 7)--it's well worth it, a one-of-a-kind reading experience.

Caveat before tackling this great but weighty novel
I have to confess to reading this novel partly out of guilt, since I kept coming across references to it elsewhere. While I did enjoy it, it was largely this literary conscience that kept me going. It is indeed a superb novel, and you can read the other reviews to see why, but it is very slow and I think I'm not the only one who found it quite a slog, or got frustrated from time to time by Clarissa's unspeakable virtuousness (although her distraught state after the rape is portrayed most movingly).

As a comparison, read Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses, one of my favourite novels and one which makes one wonder why the epistolary form was abandoned. A beautifully structured, enthralling study of sexual intrigue in eighteenth-century France, it is far more exciting and the characterisation is extraordinary, exploring both good and vicious characters with great depth and achieving the rare feat of making characters at both ends of the scale human, realistic and sympathetic. One of the main differences, apart from the driven plot of Les Liaisons against the thoughtful consideration of what in Clarissa is, classically, basically an expansion of one incident, is that Laclos explored human depravity with such rigorous honesty and fascinated sympathy that he caused a great scandal and got himself banned; Richardson, on the other hand, always had an eye out for the moral lesson (he gives everyone their just deserts at the end in quite a scrupulous manner) and to my mind his portrayal of human nature is less believable, and certainly less interesting. Clarissa would have been far more likeable for a few faults (even Melanie in Gone with the Wind makes a sarcastic comment once), and the interaction with Lovelace would perhaps, I feel, have been deeper and more tragic if she had lowered her standards and communicated with him more.

Clarissa is a densely woven, lovingly detailed novel with a plot that can be summed up in one sentence, and I think that whether it appeals to you depends very much on whether or not this is to your taste. I certainly found it of great interest in relation to other literature and will no doubt dip into it again, but I couldn't face a re-read. One problem with boasting about having finished it is that even though it was much harder work than War and Peace (and twice as long), most people won't have heard of it!

Perhaps inadvertent feminist classic
Well, I've just finished all 1499 pages of the unabridged version (ISBN 0-140-43215-9) based upon the first edition and not by any means the longest. The fact that I've finished it attests partly to its quality, partly to my vanity. For me, it is pleasant to see how conscious the Georgians were of the unfairness (as we would see of it) of the marriage articles and the treatment of women by men generally. I can't really be sure exactly where Richardson stood but in the character of Anne Howe you have have a very plain speaking and intelligent feminist, surely... albeit that the author has her marry a man she doesn't fancy, apparently against her inclination. Indeed, one of the novel's many problems is it's improbabilities. I personally think that the characterisation of Lovelace is quite crude, the novel suffers from a lack of humour, the heroine dies of we know not quite what..On the other hand, the novel is still a major narrative achievement that makes good use of its length to render an often more realistic portrayal of life in many details. For anyone genuinely interested in reading the "classics" this is one that perhaps shouldn't be too far down the list. And in the first third of the book I simply couldn't help but be amused by the comic barbarity of the parents. Their unreasonableness in contrast to their beforehand reasonableness to her is another glaring inconsistency but it doesn't spoil the novel.