Clarissa
Samuel Richardson(1748)
Extract
A feeling heart is a blessing that no one, who has it, would be without.
A young woman of impeccable virtue is besieged by the most charming libertine in England, and the longest novel in the language unfolds from the letters they and their confidants exchange as the siege tightens. Published in installments across 1748, the book drew readers who wept, argued, and wrote begging for a happy resolution Richardson refused to provide. Its power lies in merciless patience: every manipulation, every small capitulation, every flicker of hope recorded in prose that gives both predator and prey their full intelligence. Clarissa Harlowe's destruction is the founding tragedy of the English novel, the moment fiction discovered it could hold a reader in sustained, intimate horror and never look away.
If you loved this
Laclos takes Richardson's epistolary method and turns it into a weapon: the letters become the seduction.
Flaubert writes another woman destroyed by the world she lives in, but in two hundred pages instead of two thousand.
Hardy tells the same story of a woman's virtue as her destruction, and society is just as implacable two centuries later.