Reason read: year long read 2023, Reading 1001
This was difficult to engage in initially. I liken it to the soap opera of the 1800s. But the middle section improved and I finally engaged in the book. It is a story of gender roles, sibling rivalry/greed, a family that becomes torn apart without a willingness to find a resolution to the conflict. To the gender role; women have little resources and men have freedoms. It also is a picture of a great friendship between two young ladies. I did wonder at what could have caused Clarissa's health to decline, there is no hint other than the aspect of trauma on the physical health of a young lady.

I am happy to have read this book. I read it on Kindle and also used Librovox recordings occasionally. ( )

This was 1533 pages worth of a total slog, during which I admit to a lot of skimming. It is SO repetitive.

Plot spoilers ahead, but really, you're not going to read all 1500 pages and it's all pretty predictable, so no worries . . .

Young, beautiful, virtuous Clarissa is being pressured by her family to marry a man she has no love for and can't respect so that they can get their hands on the money she inherited from her grandfather. Instead she falls into the hands of the young and handsome Lovelace, who helps her escape from her family, though everyone (Clarissa included) knows he is not to be trusted. This proves to be true to an amazing extent as he kidnaps Clarissa, keeps her isolated, tries to force her into marrying him, and ultimately rapes her twice.

This novel is all told in the form of letters. And, like I said earlier, it's incredibly repetitive. The whole thing could have easily happened, even with a lot of detail and development, in about 200 pages. I know this is a considered an important work in the development of the novel, but I did not enjoy reading it. ( )

Talk about Rape Culture. This book had me FURIOUS! Furious with antiquated men who created impossible laws and cultural structures that made it impossible for women to not take the blame for anything. So many people in this book should have been prosecuted for abuse. It was just sick.

That being said... Clarissa wasn't perfect either. The end reminded me of an opera. There's always the woman with consumption who sings for 20 minutes before she dies. Such was Clarissa. ( )

I AM FINISHED!!!! This book is both enormous and slow-moving and took me a month to get through.

It's also utterly aggravating to spend so much time with a selfish, spoiled man who gaslights a vulnerable and naive young woman who does not wish to be married off to acquire her family a bigger fortune. In short, there are 537 letters filled with stories of work and faintings, self-love, and much shaming of women.

The libertines in Samuel Richardson's novels are neither sympathetic nor commendable men, but at least Pamela's Mr. B. (called Booby by Henry Fielding, WHICH SO FITS) does kooky stunts, like cross-dressing as a maid, in order to grab Pamela's breast. Mr. Lovelace just gaslights Clarissa until the infamous rape scene, and OMG, it's too much like real life and sooooo exhausting. ( )

An epistolary novel, one of the first, I believe. It is of astonishing sameness, but is a fine example of 1740's soft porn. ( )

This was an 18th century story of Clarissa Harlowe, a young girl, who rather than be forced by her family to marry a man she despises, is aided in running away by a real scoundrel. This book is written in epistolary form with Clarissa and her best friend, Miss Howe, being the primary letter writers. Miss Howe is a true friend to Clarissa throughout the very sad story. This was a very long book and began to drag in the middle when Clarissa and her friend constantly moralize on their fates; it's very repetitive. There are some parts that are unbelievable; such as when Clarissa is moved to a lodging, which in reality is a brothel (twice) and she has no idea. Maybe naivety is supposed to be part of the story line; but from the beginning one would not assume Clarissa to be naive. 1534 pages ( )

In Clarissa, Richardson solves certain technical problems coming from the letter form, one being the limited point of view and limited consciousness of the single letter-writer evident in Pamela. In Clarissa he extends the letter writing to a whole cast of characters with different views of the action, different moral principles, and different education. One character is usually the dominant letter-writer; this position moves from Clarissa to Lovelace to Belford to Morden at the very end. We can see an action from several writers who differ in their physical relation to it, their moral attitudes, and their expectations about what could and should come next.
Even when Clarissa herself is doing most of the writing in the beginning, comments by Anna Howe and others emphasize Clarissa’s isolation and also preserve some objectivity and perspective. Richardson is careful to differentiate styles, giving Howe a livelier and less circumlocutious style than Clarissa’s, even though the girls are of comparable age, interest, social position, and clear-headedness. In one letter early on Howe predicts the outcome of the present situation in words that could not come from Clarissa (of whom Johnson says, “there is always something which she prefers to truth”). Again, it is Howe who tells Clarissa that “punctilio is out of doors” if she once leaves her father’s house with Lovelace.
Lovelace is well-characterized, not to say that Richardson can really write like an educated rake, but Lovelace is splendidly evil and differentiated from his brother rakes, Belford and Mowbray. Belford was never an enthusiastic reprobate, and Mowbray is cruder than the others, as he shows in a letter after Clarissa’s death. Lovelace has a refinement that makes his intrigues more elaborate, and his enthusiasm is damnable and engaging at once. Lovelace sets up dramatic devices, such as the dinner party where Clarissa innocently comments on her fellow diners without knowing they are rakes and prostitutes. The method of “writing to the moment” is already as close to drama as you can get in narrative, and Richardson frequently sets up the narrative as drama, with speech headings, stage directions, and act/scene designations. Lovelace is in fact personating various characters: one for the landlady, another for Clarissa—and bringing in other actors who are playing parts to fool Clarissa. Lovelace’s letters occasionally turn into soliloquy, and his use of ironic self-justification approaches the comic.
The letters are also plot devices. They are written, but also “copied, sent, received, shown about, discussed, answered, even perhaps hidden, intercepted, stolen, altered, or forged” (McKillop, The Early Masters of English Fiction). Belford’s futile attempts to dissuade Lovelace from his designs on Clarissa are as ineffective as Anna Howe’s attempt to persuade Clarissa to marry Lovelace before and after the rpe. Lovelace’s forged and altered letters, on the other hand, are most effective in bringing about his purposes and keeping Clarissa ignorant of them.
The letter technique never completely breaks down in Clarissa as it does inPamela, when Richardson seems forced to insert a narrative transition. But Richardson chooses to enter the narrative many times, in notes between letters and footnotes where he tries to keep his readers’ sympathies correctly aligned, bowdlerizes, or condenses, as when he omits the early Clarissa/Lovelace correspondence or cuts and abstracts, from the posthumous letters of Clarissa, for example. All this gives a distinct impression of the physical reality of the letters as artifacts, present on the “editor’s” desk.
There are still drawbacks to the method, partly aggravated by what Sherburn calls Richardson’s “prolix fondling of episodes” (A Literary History of England). The letter writers remember impossibly involved sequences of incidents and long passages of dialogue fraught with nuances. We wonder how they could have found time to writ their voluminous letters. Dorothy Van Ghent complains that the letter form “slows down the pace of the story almost intolerably” (The English Novel: Form and Function), but if we compare an epistolary novel like Humphry Clinker, we suspect that the pace is all Richardson’s doing and none of the form’s.
The key to the success of the technique here is that it opens up the book and lets the reader in. We only have, I believe, a very limited identification with either Pamela or Clarissa in the sense that we get inside their characters and see them as us. They are monsters—not in the way Fielding thought Pamela a moral monster, but in the sense that they do successfully resist what Richardson tries to depict as irresistible forces. Pamela resists the guile and force of Mr. B, and if we see the depicted actions as merely representative of the attack Pamela has to fend off, her story is one of almost impossibly triumphant virtue. In that sense she is difficult to identify with, as Aristotle said was the case with heroes who were too good. Clarissa is similarly difficult to inhabit, not in her successful resistance to rape, but in her resistance to pressure from everyone to marry Lovelace, who is rich and attractive in addition to the love he so assiduously feigns. In the middle of the book, when Lovelace proposes repeatedly to Clarissa, while Anna Howe is urging her to marry him and Clarissa’s parents are saying that marrying him is the only thing she can do, we find ourselves saying “Do it! Why are you hesitating?” even though we know Lovelace’s character and his whole mind. Clarissa’s constant awareness, despite her youth and comparative innocence, without the special knowledge we have, that Lovelace will not do as a husband for her—that is what makes her so different from you and me. It makes her “an Exemplar to her sex” at the same time it makes her difficult to identify with.
Richardson allows us to enter the novel by using multiple correspondents. More specifically, the characters of Anna Howe and Belford, and to a slighter extent Colonel Morden, are the means by which we can get into the action of Clarissa as participants who are enough like us. The very ineffectualness of Howe and Belford is indicative of this function: like us, they are forced to watch what happens with precious little power to affect it one way or another. When Belford exhorts Lovelace not to hurt Clarissa the admonition has no more force than our hissing at the villain from the audience of a melodrama. Anna Howe tells Clarissa to marry Lovelace, and so do we—both she and we acting probably against our better judgment but wanting something other than the tragic alternative we suspect is coming. They are surrogates for us as readers completely unable to affect the action, and we are inside them urging some hopeful move.
Colonel Morden’s function is slightly different in terms of his effect on the reader. He comes, against the professed better judgment of Richardson, who supposedly condemned duels, to bring about poetic justice, or at least revenge. It is curious that there are so many duels in Richardson, but he would probably say it was a pity that there were so many real and attempted rapes, too, in life as well as in his books, but that does not show he approved of them. At any rate we may identify with Morden, and at last our identification allows us to participate in action. We help kill Lovelace, we too have some second thoughts about whether we should have done it, but at least it allows some feeling of resolution of the action, dispersion of the emotional tension, and feeling of having done something.

My worst intellectual flaw is my poor memory. I have been reading all my life and can still tell you what I've read and haven't, but few details from any of it remain permanently lodged (thus the personal value of writing reviews). The plot of this 1,500 page novel is simple enough I'll retain that much, but the ocean of emotions, the flood of quotable bits, those are going to escape me. What I'll be able to hang onto is how it has made me feel: very, very full. Resuming my reading each time was, emotionally speaking, like plugging back into an electrical socket.

Most impressive is that it was a memorable and fascinating experience even though not much actually happens for all the size of this behemoth. The ratio in length between the hugeness of this novel and a summary of its action is frankly ridiculous: the back cover of my edition managed it shamelessly in one short sentence. You'll benefit from knowing the overarching story in advance, but to avoid spoilers and only speak metaphorically: it is about the tempting of an angel by a devil, where the angel is reluctant to believe anyone is truly evil and the devil is convinced he can prove or make every angel a fallen creature.

Although it could have been condensed to a fifth of its length or less, here is a case where sheer size lends a work its greatness. Small events are made momentous through being viewed and considered from every conceivable angle. These characters have an opinion to share on everything, and every position is brilliantly argued. Back-and-forth correspondence and the artfulness of rhetoric and self-deceptions won me over early on, convincing me to persevere and soon to enjoy. Suspense is often built on the back of nothing greater than wondering how someone will reply to some modest proposal or other, and yet I felt that suspense. Much of the driving thrust of most novels, 'what action happens next?', is replaced here with 'how will X possibly respond to Y?' or 'When will Y realize the deception of X?' Characters are written into corners and write their way back out brilliantly, over the course of 537 letters all told. There's nothing cold about this exercise; almost every letter tweaks the heart, be it to feel empathy and compassion, chuckle at a spot of humour, or experience outrage and demand justice.

There is one problem towards the end: the exhortation by virtually everyone for Clarissa to get over herself and marry her rapist, as if that would be a happy ending. At least Clarissa herself wears something closer to our 21st century views, even if she can't frame it that way.

Samuel Johnson, a contemporary of Samuel Richardson, said of this work "If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment." The good doctor has summarized my own sentiment perfectly. ( )

Well, after finishing U.S.A. at 1,300 pages or so, what better way to follow it up than to write a review of a novel that's even bigger?

What surprised me most about this novel is how readable it is. For its size and the era in which it was written, this is one of the most readable novels I've tackled. That is very definitely something to be thankful for.

The story basically revolves around the eponymous heroine Clarissa who, being the sole inheritor of her grandfather's estate, finds herself the victim of family plotting when they attempt to force her to marry a man she has absolutely no feelings for.

Resolutely standing her ground only results in Clarissa being completely isolated by her so-called family who virtually imprison her in solitary confinement within the family home.

Fearing that she will be dragged to the alter and committed against her will, she seeks escape and the supposed safe house offered by Lovelace, a man who comes across as a valiant aide in time of trouble. We readers however, are aware of his ulterior motives as Richardson relates his tale entirely in letters between various of the characters.

Clarissa's frying pan becomes Clarissa's fire as she discovers Lovelace's true purpose. And while this plot is enough to drive the novel on for well over 1,000 pages, quite unbelievably, it culminates in a living room scene that is as damp as a damp squib can be. I honestly thought I'd perhaps missed segment of the audio version I listened to on Librivox (which I recommend actually). Quite inexplicable.

Still, Richardson's novel is a masterful study of misogyny. Lovelace (the pronunciation of whose name is no coincidence) writes some absolutely writhing letters to his friends in which you can't help but see Richardson's criticism of his contemporary "rake." It's scathing.

And through it all, of course, Clarissa's virtue remains a bastion of impregnability. If this had been written by a woman, it would be a seminal feminist text. But it wasn't, so it isn't. Too bad. ( )

This was written as a collection of letters from the parties concerned. A playboy and a virtuous maiden. He is determined to conquer her and ingratiates himself upon her family who is looking for advancement in their social standing. She sees him for the devious corrupt man that he really is and desperately tries to avoid him. He is so charismatic that everyone seems to be against Clarissa. Kidnapping is involved. Can Clarissa maintain her virtue when the world is against her? A wonderful read. ( )

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. ( )

Review: It says a lot that out of the 1499 pages of this novel, I only though the last 100 superfluous. If you like melodrama you will adore this novel. Completely comprised of letters between the characters, the minutiae of their psychological/spiritual motivations are enumerated beautifully. The characters are everything here. Clarissa, the virtuous maiden, Lovelace, the villain, and a host of both true-hearted and villainous minor players inhabit these pages. I absolutely loved this, with the exception that I think the ending was unnecessarily drawn out. ( )

I read this thing in its epistolary-entirety over the summer before learning that only sections of it were assigned. I think I got a bit more out of it than my classmates and was impressed by how the character of Lovelace overpowered Richardson. ( )

More than any other book I write about, I feel in no way qualified to give an opinion on Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. Where do I start?

Firstly, this is a long novel. The Penguin Classics edition is 1,499 pages long. The font is very small and the pages are quite large. This reproduces Richardson's original version of Clarissa as first published in several volumes in 1747 and 1748. Richardson seemed to revise this original text quite heavily and some later editions have another 200 pages added. I think the free ebook versions use the longer, later texts but I'm not sure.

Secondly, if you decide to read Clarissa you'll need to get rid of all our 21st century and 20th century ideas about what a novel is or should be. This book is long and, most of the time, nothing happens. Even when something does happen, you don't get to read about it happening: Clarissa is an epistolary novel (written in the form of letters) so you only get to read about events through the characters' letters after they've happened.

Thirdly, do not attempt the Pearl rule* (or, if you do, you'll need to increase the Pearl rule by at least a factor of 10). I found it took me quite a long time to adapt to the style of writing and the pace and I struggled most in the first 500 pages. I found it really started to get going somewhere around the 700 page mark and the last 500 pages flew by.

Perhaps the best thing to do is to quote Samuel Johnson who said Clarissa was 'the first book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart'. With all the books published in the 250+ years since Clarissa was first brought out I can see there could be some uncertainty about Clarissa still being the first book but I would definitely argue for it being in the top ten. The characters are not all pleasant, but they are all real and they all have different voices and styles in the letters they write. I think that must be difficult enough to do in what we think of as a normal length novel, surely it must be harder when you have to sustain this across almost 1,500 pages?

Finally, I should note that Clarissa is not going to be a book for everyone (and that's ok). It's long and not much happens. Clarissa herself spends most of the novel in various unpleasant situations and that's difficult to read about - most of my struggles at the beginning of the novel were because it felt very emotionally claustrophobic. It is often described as boring and there is justification for that. I disagree (quite strongly I think) but I can understand why people find it boring. To quote Samuel Johnson again, 'if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself'. That's (thankfully) a bit of an exaggeration but there was a lot of frustration expressed on the group read thread.

I felt rather uncertain about rating Clarissa. In the end I gave it 5 stars because it's so memorable - I'm sure the book and the characters will stay with me for a long time and also because on finishing it, I found myself thinking that this would really reward rereading (not going to happen soon though) and it's rare that I think that on finishing a book. I would definitely say I enjoyed my experience of reading Clarissa, although there were points when I struggled. I'm pleased and sad to have finished reading it and I don't think there's higher praise to give a novel than to say I felt sad to have no more left to read. Recommended, with caution.

*The Pearl rule, courtesy of Nancy Pearl, says "If you still don't like a book after slogging through the first 50 pages, set it aside. If you're more than 50 years old, subtract your age from 100 and only grant it that many pages." ( )

Yes, it's the longest novel ever written (in the English language). Read it with a small group back in grad school for a class on Libertine literature, but as far as I know, Brian Bates and myself were the only ones to stick to it and finish it, and the others were not even apologetic about it. I could say a lot about this novel, but nothing that others have not already noted. I liked the book, and felt a kind of catharsis at having made it to the end (and not in way as a reaction to the narrative). Alongside it, I read Terry Eagleton's The Rape of Clarissa, and remember my professor saying once that people in her field were offended that Eagleton had "dive bombed" in their territory. I'm still awestruck by the how Richardson represented Clarissa's trauma through fragmented sentences scattered on the page. But overall, the book is disturbing for how Richardson attempts some ambiguity concerning the role Clarissa plays in her own rape, and there is much haunting subtext concerning the material and monetary cost of Lovelaces' attempts to seduce Clarissa-- where the rape becomes "cutting losses." I'll never read it again, of course.

I read Clarissa as part of the 75ers group read of the novel for 2012, and mostly kept to the plan of just reading each day's letters on that day (thus stretching the reading out pretty much over the course of the year). But i got a bit impatient at the end, and finished the last ninety pages or so at one go (so, from 15 September onward). That said, I'm glad I read the book this way, since I am fairly certain I wouldn't have made it very far had I just plunged in and tried to read it straight through.

The plot is simple: virtuous young woman's family tries to force her into marriage with a most unpleasant chap; she rebels and gets suckered into running off with libertine Lovelace, whose main gain is seduction. That accomplished, Clarissa declines and ultimately dies. The story is told through letters, mainly but not exclusively between Clarissa and her friend Anna Howe and Lovelace and his friend John Belford.

Not a whole lot happens for incredibly long stretches of time: months and hundreds of pages pass with Clarissa shut up in her room trying to get her family to quit trying to marry her off against her will, and then hundreds more pages as she lingers at death's door. Instances of anything much actually happening are few and far between. But, as Richardson points out in a postscript, these long stretches "are the foundation of the whole ... The letters and conversations, where the story makes the slowest progress, are presumed to be characteristic. They give occasion likewise to suggest many interesting personalities, in which a good deal of the instruction essential to a work of this nature is conveyed."

Reading it as I did, a bit at a time, does much, as Richardson suggests, 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." If you do tackle it, I'd recommend trying it this way.

It's interesting to watch some of the characters evolve over the course of the book through their letters, and the view of English society at the time is fascinating. It's certainly no easy slog to get through, though. ( )

This novel was published ten years after Richardson's popular "Pamela", and is the story of a lower-class girl who is debauched by her employer. The man's name is Lovelace and although a gentleman, he is a profligate womanizer. He does come to love Clarissa, however, and the story ends more or less happily. In the usual 18th century style, the narrative is verbose and moralistic. If you have read Fielding's "Tom Jones", you know what i mean. But when you accept the slow pace and begin to enjoy the precisely tuned language, the colorful descriptions of the society and the times make it worth reading.

I read the abridged version of this book in a literature class--for my English lit degree. I enjoyed the book. I find the reviews here to be hilarious. I liked the abridged version so much, that I bought the version with EVERY WORD that Richardson wrote. I haven't read it yet--I'm saving it for my old age, when I'm not able to drive. I'm really, really hoping that I don't go blind with macular degeneration when I'm in my 80s. If I don't, I'm sure I'll get this book read.

Okay, so I didn't save it for my old age. The reading of it took me from January 2012 to March 2013. I read the Penguin Classics edition, 1499 pages, based on the first edition. Highly recommended. This was one of the greatest reading experiences of my life. For anyone who reads the classics, this is a must-read. ( )

http://bookchronicle.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/jane-austens-contemporaries-samuel... ( )

“…I well remember, the flattering notice he [Dr. Johnson] took of a lady present, on her saying that she was inclined to estimate the morality of every person according as they liked or disliked Clarissa Harlowe. He was a great admirer of Richardson's works in general, but of Clarissa he always spoke with the highest enthusiastic praise. He used to say, that it was the first Book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human Heart.” –Miss Reynolds {Sir Joshua's sister], quoted in Johnsonian Miscellanies.

' Sir, there is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's than in all Tom Jones.' --Life of Johnson

A book so thoroughly unpleasant it would almost be worth reading were it not also staggeringly long and jaw-droppingly tedious. ( )

Can be used for reading or as a doorstop!

Dull dull dull. Knowing more or less how the story ends, I found that I couldn't wait for horrible things to happen to the preening, self-righteous Clarissa. Apart from the ghastly characters, the story also suffers from the indulgence of self-publishing. Richardson really could have used an editor to trim the book by at least half. ( )

I read the abridged version, and even that was too long for me. A long, epsitlary borefest with loathesome characters that ought to be lashed. I hated this book with a fiery passion. Just seeing this book makes me grit my teeth. ( )

Somewhat claustrophobic. Try reading it in one sitting. (that was a joke) To be honest I haven't finished it yet, but I am looking to someday. I don't think it's as bad as the other reader said. Richardson's intent seems to be to immerse you in the emotional world of the story, and it works. ( )