In the Library
Pamela
Samuel Richardson, 1740
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 16 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 32
- Length
- Length 221k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
yet, sir, will I dare to tell you, that I will make no free-will offering of my virtue.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Clarissa
Samuel Richardson
Clarissa does the same thing, but lets the same predator win, so you feel every letter Pamela ever needed to write to escape hers.
£1.99
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding
Tom Jones does the same thing, but flips the whole moral scoreboard, rewarding a hero's appetite instead of a heroine's restraint.
£1.99
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre does the same thing, but makes her heroine walk away first, so the marriage she finally accepts is chosen, not survived.
£1.99
About the book
Pamela Andrews writes with her master's household in an uproar around her, hiding each finished letter in her stays because the man who might read it owns the house she writes from. Mr B, son of her late mistress, corners her in a closet one night, then has her carried off to a remote country house where a hired keeper watches her every hour, and still she keeps writing, certain that a full and honest account of what is happening to her is the one thing he cannot take from her. Samuel Richardson built one of the earliest English novels out of nothing but this: a servant girl's own letters, arriving almost in real time, close enough to her fear that the page seems to shake. The uncomfortable marvel of Pamela is its ending, virtue not just preserved but married, the captor turned husband, and Richardson trusting the very tenderness that pored over her stolen letters to now love her outright. Two centuries on, readers still hold those letters to the light, unsure what they are looking at.