Lovelace might promise Clarissa her freedom, but she soon realizes she has only exchanged one form of constraint for another. In London, the rooms of the sinister house-within-a-house are mapped out like the territory in a war zone, with the dining room the neutral ground, and Clarissa’s own room defended with bar, lock and bolt. But even that is not enough. Because Lovelace controls this space, and that permits him to intrude upon her, even within her locked room:
At day-dawn I looked through the keyhole of my beloved’s door. . . . There I beheld her in a sweet slumber, which I hope will prove refreshing to her disturbed senses; sitting in her elbow-chair, her apron over her head, and that supported by one sweet hand, the other hanging down upon her side, in a sleepy lifelessness; half of one pretty foot only visible.
The struggle between Lovelace and Clarissa—like the one between Pamela and Mr. B—resolves again and again into these moments of erotic voyeurism, where the sleeping or otherwise passive heroine is spied upon by her predator without her knowledge. The man gazes, the woman is gazed at; and the epistolary form makes us, as readers, complicit in that gaze.
And finally, as the critic Margaret Anne Doody has observed, the gradual constriction of Clarissa’s space from estate to house, and house to chamber, culminates in her purchase of the smallest space of all, her coffin, the only “room” over which she has true control, and which she decorates with as much care as she did her pretty parlor at Harlowe Place:
For ornaments: At top, an hour-glass winged. At bottom, an urn.
Under the hour-glass, on another plate this inscription:
Here the wicked cease from troubling: And HERE the weary be at rest. Job iii. 17.
I hope, now, that you will understand why I believe this novel to be such a masterpiece. A masterpiece of the eighteenth century, but also one for our own. Indeed I passionately believe that Clarissa is a very contemporary book. In an age when we communicate less and less by speech, and more and more by written text (on screen if not on paper), when we can so easily reveal more of ourselves than we intend, when social media make us more vulnerable than we have ever been to the dangers and deceits of words, Clarissa is a novel for our times.
—Lynn Shepherd
Selected Bibliography
Babb, Howard S. “Richardson’s Narrative Mode in Clarissa.” Studies in English Literature 16 (1976): 451–60.
Ball, Donald L. Samuel Richardson’s Theory of Fiction. The Hague: Mouton, 1971.
Bartolomeo, Joseph F. Matched Pairs: Gender and Intertextual Dialogue in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Associated University Presses, 2002.
Blewett, David, ed. Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Samuel Richardson: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Braudy, Leo. “Penetration and Impenetrability in Clarissa.” In New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Literature. Ed. Phillip Harth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974. 177–206.
Brissenden, R. F. Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade. London: Macmillan, 1974.
Brophy, Elizabeth Bergen. Samuel Richardson: The Triumph of Craft. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974.
——. Samuel Richardson. Boston: Twayne, 1987.
Brown, Murray L., ed. “Editor’s Comment: Richardson Discovers the Modern Imagination.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 28 (Spring 1955): Refiguring Richardson’s Clarissa.
Brownstein, Rachel Mayer. “‘An Exemplar to Her Sex’: Richardson’s Clarissa.” Yale Review 66 (1977): 30-47.
Bueler, Lois E. Clarissa’s Plots. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994.
Butler, Janet. “The Garden: Early Symbol of Clarissa’s Complicity.” Studies in English Literature 24 (1984): 527-44.
Carroll, John. “Lovelace as Tragic Hero.” University of Toronto Quarterly 42 (1972): 14-25.
Carroll, John, ed. Samuel Richardson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969.
Castle, Terry. Clarissa’s Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson’s “Clarissa.” Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982.
——. “Lovelace’s Dream.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 13 (1984): 29-42.
Coetzee, J. M. Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986-1999. New York: Viking, 2001.
Cohan, Steven M. “Clarissa and the Individuation of Character.” ELH 43 (1976): 163-83.
Cook, Elizabeth Heckendorn. Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Day, Robert Adams. Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction before Richardson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966.
Doederlein, Sue Warwick. “Clarissa in the Hands of the Critics.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 16 (1983): 401-14.
Doody, Margaret Anne. “Disguise and Personality in Richardson’s Clarissa.“ Eighteenth-Century Life 12 (1988): 18-39.
——. A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
——. “Samuel Richardson: Fiction and Knowledge.” In Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Ed. John Richetti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 90-119.
Doody, Margaret Anne, and Peter Sabor, eds. Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Doody, Margaret Anne, and Florian Stuber. “Clarissa Censored.” Modern Language Studies 18 (1988): 74-88.
——. “The Clarissa Project and Clarissa‘s Reception.” Text: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12 (1999): 123-41.
Downs, Brian W. Richardson. London: Routledge, 1928.
Dussinger, John A. “Conscience and the Pattern of Christian Perfection in Clarissa.“ PMLA 81 (1966): 236-45.
Duyfhuizen, Bernard. “Epistolary Narratives of Transmission and Transgression.” Comparative Literature 37 (1985): 1-26.
Eagleton, Terry. The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1982.
Eaves, T. C. Duncan, and Ben D. Kimpel. “The Composition of Clarissa and Its Revision before Publication.” PMLA 83 (1968): 416-28.
——. Samuel Richardson: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
Farrell, William J. “The Style and the Action in Clarissa.“ Studies in English Literature 3 (1963): 365-75.
Ferguson, Frances. “Rape and the Rise of the Novel.” Representations 20 (1987): 88-112.
Flynn, Carol Houlihan. Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.
Flynn, Carol Houlihan, and Edward Copeland, eds. Clarissa and Her Readers: New Essays for The Clarissa Project. Brooklyn, NY: AMS, 1999.
Frega, Donnalee. Speaking in Hunger: Gender, Discourse, and Consumption in “Clarissa.” Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.
Gillis, Christina Marsden. The Paradox of Privacy: Epistolary Form in “Clarissa.” Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984.
Goldberg, Rita. Sex and Enlightenment: Women in Richardson and Diderot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Golden, Morris. Richardson’s Characters. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963.
——. “Richardson’s Repetitions.” PMLA 82 (1967): 64-67.
Gopnik, Irwin. A Theory of Style and Richardson’s “Clarissa.” The Hague: Mouton, 1970.
Gordon, Scott Paul. “Disinterested Selves: Clarissa and the Tactics of Sentiment.” ELH 64 (1997): 473-502.
Gunn, Daniel P. “Is Clarissa Bourgeois Art?” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10 (1997): 1-14.
Gwilliam, Tassie. Samuel Richardson’s Fictions of Gender. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Hannaford, Richard Gordon. Samuel Richardson: An An
notated Bibliography of Critical Studies. New York: Garland, 1980.
Harris, Jocelyn. “Protean Lovelace.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2 (1990): 327-46.
——. Samuel Richardson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Hill, Christopher. “Clarissa Harlowe and Her Times.” Essays in Criticism 5 (1955): 315-40.
Hinton, Laura. “The Heroine’s Subjection: Clarissa, Sadomasochism, and Natural Law.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32 (1999): 293-308.
How, James. “Clarissa’s Cyberspace: The Development of Epistolary Space in Richardson’s Clarissa.“ Eighteenth-Century Novel 1 (2001): 37-69.
Hudson, Nicholas. “Arts of Seduction and the Rhetoric of Clarissa.” Modern Language Quarterly 51 (1990): 25-43.
Kaplan, Fred. “ ‘Our Short Story’: The Narrative Devices of Clarissa.” Studies in English Literature 11 (1971): 549-62.
Karl, Frederick. A Reader’s Guide to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel. New York: Noonday, 1974.
Karpuk, Susan Price. Samuel Richardson’s “Clarissa”: An Index Analyzing the Characters, Subjects, and Place Names. Brooklyn, NY: AMS, 2000.
Kearney, Anthony M. “Clarissa and the Epistolary Form.” Essays in Criticism 16 (1966): 44-56.
——. Samuel Richardson. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968.
——. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa. London: Edward Arnold, 1975.
Keymer, Tom. Richardson’s “Clarissa” and the Eighteenth-Century Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. “Clarissa Restored.” Review of English Studies 10 (1959): 156-71.
——. Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973.
Koehler, Martha J. “Epistolary Closure and Triangular Return in Richardson’s Clarissa.“ Journal of Narrative Technique 24 (1994): 153-72.
Konigsberg, Ira. Samuel Richardson and the Dramatic Novel. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968.
Lams, Victor J. Clarissa’s Narrators. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
Lee, Joy Kyunghae. “The Commodification of Virtue: Chastity and the Virginal Body in Richardson’s Clarissa.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 36 (1995): 38-54.
MacCarthy, B. G. The Female Pen: Women Writers and Novelists, 1621-1818; with a preface by Janet Todd. New York: New York University Press, 1994.
Martin, Mary Patricia. “Reading Reform in Richardson’s Clarissa.” Studies in English Literature 37 (1997): 595-614.
McCrea, Brian. “Clarissa’s Pregnancy and the Fate of Patriarchal Power.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9 42 (1997): 125-48.
McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
McKillop, Alan Dugald. The Early Masters of English Fiction. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1956.
——. Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936.
Myer, Valerie Grosvenor, ed. Samuel Richardson: Passion and Prudence. London: Vision Press, 1986.
Napier, Elizabeth R. “ ‘Tremble and Reform’: The Inversion of Power in Richardson’s Clarissa.“ ELH 42 (1975): 214-23.
Ostovich, Helen M. “ ‘Our Views Must Now Be Different’: Imprisonment and Friendship in Clarissa.” Modern Language Quarterly 52 (1991): 153-69.
Park, William. “Clarissa as Tragedy.” Studies in English Literature 16 (1976): 461-71.
Pascoe, Judith. “Before I Read Clarissa I Was Nobody: Aspirational Reading and Samuel Richardson’s Great Novel.” Hudson Review 56 (2003): 239-54.
Preston, John. The Created Self: The Reader’s Role in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. London: Heinemann, 1970.
Price, Martin. “Clarissa and Lovelace.” In To the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy from Dryden to Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1964.
Rabkin, Norman. “Clarissa: A Study in the Nature of Convention.” ELH 23 (1956): 204-17.
Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady. Ed. Florian Stuber. Brooklyn, NY: AMS Press, 1990. [Facsimile; third edition].
——. Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady. Ed. Angus Ross. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1985.
——. Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady. Ed. Philip Stevick. San Francisco: Rinehart Press, 1971.
——. Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady. Ed. George Sherburn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
——. Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady. Ed. John Butt. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1932.
——. The Richardson-Stinstra Correspondence and Stinstra’s Prefaces to “Clarissa.” Ed. William C. Slattery. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.
——. Samuel Richardson’s Published Commentary on “Clarissa,” 1747-65; introduction by Jocelyn Harris; texts edited with headnotes by Thomas Keymer. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998.
Richetti, John J. The English Novel in History, 1700-1780. London: Routledge, 1998.
——. Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 1700-1739. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
Rivero, Albert J., ed. New Essays on Samuel Richardson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Rogers, Katharine M. Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.
Roussel, Roy. The Conversation of the Sexes: Seduction and Equality in Selected Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Texts. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Sale, William Merritt Jr. “From Pamela to Clarissa.” In The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to Chauncey Brewster Tinker. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1949. 127-38.
——. Samuel Richardson: A Bibliographical Record of His Literary Career. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1936.
——. Samuel Richardson, Master Printer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1950.
Sherbo, Arthur. “Time and Place in Richardson’s Clarissa.” Boston University Studies in English 3 (1957): 139-46.
Smith, Sarah W. R. Samuel Richardson: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1984.
Spacks, Patricia Ann Meyer. Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Stephanson, Raymond. “Richardson’s ‘Nerves’: The Philosophy of Sensibility in Clarissa.” Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 267-85.
Stewart, Keith. “Towards Defining an Aesthetic for the Familiar Letter in Eighteenth-Century England.” Prose Studies 5 (1982): 179-92.
Stuber, Florian. “On Fathers and Authority in Clarissa.” Studies in English Literature 25 (1985), 557-74.
——. “On Original and Final Intentions, or Can There Be an Authoritative Clarissa?” Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship 2 (1985): 229-44.
Todd, Janet M. Sensibility: An Introduction. London: Methuen, 1986.
——. Women’s Friendship in Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
Traugott, John. “Clarissa‘s Richardson: An Essay to Find the Reader.” In English Literature in the Age of Disguise. Ed. Maximillian E. Novak. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
——. “Molesting Clarissa.” Novel 15 (1982): 163-70.
Turner, James Grantham. “Richardson and His Circle.” In Columbia History of the British Novel. Ed. John Richetti. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 73-101.
Van Ghent, Dorothy. The English Novel: Form and Function. New York: Rinehart, 1953.
Vermillion, Mary. “Clarissa and the Marriage Act.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9.4 (1997): 395-412.
Warner, William Beatty. “Proposal and Habitation: The Temporality and Authority of Interpretation in and about a Scene of Richardson’s Clarissa.” Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature and Culture 7 (1979): 169-200.
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�—. Reading “Clarissa”: The Struggles of Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957.
Wehrs, Donald R. “Irony, Storytelling and the Conflict of Interpretation in Clarissa.” ELH 53 (1986): 759-78.
Wendt, Alan. “Clarissa’s Coffin.” Philological Quarterly 39 (1960): 481-95.
Wilt, Judith. “He Could Go No Farther. A Modest Proposal about Lovelace and Clarissa.” PMLA 92 (1977): 19-32.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Samuel Richardson and the Eighteenth-Century Puritan Character. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1972.
1 See Joseph Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897; New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
2 From a letter to Lady Bradshaigh, 1756, unpublished correspondence in the Forster Collection, vol. II.f.80, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Available on microfilm in the Research Publications series, Primary Source Microfilm, Gale Group, Woodbridge, CT.
3 T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) 206.
4 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady, ed. Philip Stevick (New York: Rinehart, 1971).
5 See the Stevick edition and also that of George Sherburn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
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