In the Library
Clarissa
Samuel Richardson, 1748
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 67 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 539
- Length
- Length 928k words
£1.99
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The reading guide, in the app
How to Read Clarissa
The longest novel in English is also, page for page, one of the most psychologically acute ever written, and reading an abridged version that cuts it to nine hundred pages loses almost none of the plot and almost all of what makes it extraordinary.
The first thing to know is that you do not need to read all of it. The unabridged Clarissa runs to nearly a million words, which makes it longer than War and Peace and Ulysses combined, and Richardson built in considerable repetition by design, because the epistolary form he used, in which the story unfolds entirely through letters between characters, means that the same events are reported, analysed, and argued about by multiple correspondents across multiple letters. A good abridgement, and Angus Ross's Penguin abridgement is the standard recommendation, cuts the novel to roughly a third of its length while preserving all the major scenes and all the major characters. Read that version, and read it without guilt.
If you like this, try
Dangerous Liaisons
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Laclos takes Richardson's epistolary method and turns it into a weapon: the letters become the seduction.
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Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert writes another woman destroyed by the world she lives in, but in two hundred pages instead of two thousand.
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
Hardy tells the same story of a woman's virtue as her destruction, and society is just as implacable two centuries later.
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About the book
Two people sit writing letters about the same events, and the horror is that you believe them both. Lovelace is the most charming correspondent in English fiction, witty, quicksilver, confessing his schemes with such relish that you almost root for him even as he closes a trap around a girl of eighteen. Clarissa Harlowe writes from inside it: hounded by a family who would sell her to a man she cannot bear, then manoeuvred toward a rake who has decided her virtue is a fortress worth the siege. Across nearly a million words, Samuel Richardson lets you watch the slow machinery of ruin grind, letter answering letter, and makes you feel how a world that calls a woman good only when she submits has already done the seducer's work for him. What undoes you is her clarity. She sees the danger, reasons against it, and the trap shuts anyway.