How many pages clarissa

Richardson had been an established printer and publisher for most of his life when, at the age of 51, he wrote his first novel and immediately became one of the most popular and admired writers of his time. Search review text.

I would never recommend this book to anyone. I will say that first off, despite my love of it, despite the fact that it will remain present in my consciousness a long time, and I may write things on it, may deliberately continue my interaction with the text in the way that one sometimes does after finishing a book that has had such an impact upon them. For it was a completely devestating eight hundred closely written pages, letter after letter after letter.

One knew from very early on where the plot was going, but yet it still managed to wreck havoc with my emotions up through the very last page.

It is, in the simplest form, the chronicle of a young woman with a startlingly, unusually, poignantly strong sense of personal integrity, both physical and moral, and the way that the world, from all angles, goes out of its way to destroy that integrity. As an individual tragedy it is, as I have said, devestating. The craft of the epistolary novel, though one unfamiliar to most modern readers, is perfectly demonstrated here, as Clarissa and Lovelace's letters reveal plot and character with pitch-perfect pacing and tone.

They are both very complicated individuals, perfect creations of a talented author, and the epistolary format was no doubt the most effective one to show that. I loved this book.

I loved this book entirely and intensely. But I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else. Either it would be as devestating to them as it was to me, or they would find the style dull and tiresome. Neither outcome would be particularly profitable to the reader though, if you like books of this sort and are willing to spend a few days wrapped in the intensity of it One reaches the end of Clarissa not so much with a feeling of accomplishment as with a feeling of total exhaustion.

It is very difficult to sum up a book the size of Clarissa. Its length is so overwhelming that its difference from other novels starts to seem not so much a matter of degree, as a kind of category error. There's a real sense in which Clarissa is not a novel at all, but some other thing.

I joked when I finished it about turning back to the first page and starting again; but actually, there are few books where this would work better, because who the hell can remember what happened way back then? The last time I read that bit was eleven months ago!

For such a huge novel, the plot is very simple. The action falls roughly into three page phases. In the first, Clarissa is trapped in her family home, dealing with her tyrannical relations and doing her best to resist marrying this guy they've got earmarked for her. In the second phase, having run away with Lovelace, she is trapped in a brothel in London, trying to resist his advances and escape. And in the third, now on her own, she gradually wastes away and dies as Lovelace comes to terms with what has happened.

Each of these phases is drawn out a little too long for modern tastes — for my taste, anyway — but this is not because these sections are emotionally unconvincing, but, on the contrary, because they are so emotionally powerful. The second section in particular I found almost unbearably oppressive — reading endless descriptions of Clarissa's attempts to get away from her prison, and knowing that I had only eight hundred pages of failure, gaslighting and sexual assault to look forward to, was grim.

It is surely a hard read for anyone with personal experience of these issues to take on. The moments of transition between these phases — when she first runs away with Lovelace, and later when she finally escapes from him — are genuinely exciting. In these linking sections, when a few scraps of action briefly intrude on the narrative, the book really comes alive.

For all of these reasons, it's one of the few novels where I can imagine an abridged version would work really well. The single dominating incident of the book, occurring about halfway through, is Lovelace's drugging and rape of Clarissa. This act is never described directly, although everything circles around it: it's the black hole at the heart of the novel, warping everything that comes before and after.

It's worth considering this rape in some detail, because it's here I think that Richardson interacts most revealingly with contemporary assumptions, and it helps explain why the book cast such a shadow over the rest of eighteenth-century literature.

It's notable that Lovelace has to drug Clarissa first, and have her held down by his accomplices, because without such details Richardson would hardly have been able to generate a sense of outrage at all. A lot of sex at the time was, as literature makes uncomfortably clear, extremely close to rape anyway. To remain respectable, she required coercion. Although couples who were into each other must, in practice, have found plenty of ways to signal such things, in a formal sense consensual sex was left looking not very different from unconsensual.

But yet, imaginest thou that I expect direct consent from such a lover of forms as this lady is known to be? Of course, Lovelace is intended to be a despicable villain, but nevertheless the assumptions behind his villainy say a lot of uncomfortable things about the book's social context. She, no less than the other characters, understands rape as being awful not as we might see it because of the physical violence or breach of bodily autonomy, but rather because of the transgression of that nebulous quality, her honour.

Rape was, after all, basically a crime of property — and since her family have given her up, Lovelace wonders, whose property, I pray thee, shall I invade, if I pursue my schemes of love and vengeance? From this point of view, what has actually happened hardly matters compared to what people will assume has happened. Nothing but the law stands in our way, upon that account; and the opinion of what a modest woman will suffer, rather than become a viva voce accuser, lessens much an honest fellow's apprehensions on that score.

Her sense of being wounded morally, and almost spiritually, perhaps helps to explain Clarissa's slow death in the last third of the novel, which from a purely medical point of view is otherwise totally baffling. In effect, she dies from offended sensibility. This is meant to be inspiring, but for a modern reader, it's hard to sympathise with her insipidly forgiving attitude, in which she positively welcomes her own suffering in a sort of ecstasy of religious masochism. Rebecca West has deconstructed this attitude at length in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon ; I think we know enough now to be suspicious of its moral value.

Instead, it is to Clarissa's bestie Anna Howe that we must look for some traces of common sense. She is pleasingly unforgiving of what has happened to Clarissa, and consistently connects it with the prevailing conditions of sexual inequality in society at large. Her rant about never wanting to get married is a joy: But there must be bear and forbear , methinks some wise body will tell me: but why must I be teazed into a state where that must be necessarily the case; when now I can do as I please, and wish only to be let alone to do as best pleases me?

And what, in effect, does my mother say? We are supposed to like Anna, but we are also supposed to see that she has flaws, and this opposition to a decent marriage is, I think, intended to be one of those flaws — one that's eventually overcome. Her presence here — feisty, but eventually finding happiness in wedlock — points the way forward for fiction: if you rewrite the book from Anna Howe's perspective, you get a Jane Austen novel.

By Austen's time, the kind of things that happened to Clarissa had to be palmed away on to background characters like Lydia Bennet. When Clarissa came out, the whole concept of women's sexuality was going through a huge shift: women went from being thought of as essentially lubricious and sexually voracious as had been the prevalent idea in the Middle Ages , to being thought of as vulnerable guardians of delicacy and honour. All these trends are crystallised really strongly in Richardson, and they show up especially sharply when you compare him to contemporaries like Fielding or Smollett.

These things certainly seem to offer plenty of reasons to recommend reading the novel, and it's a bit strange for me to find myself writing so much and I could keep going for twice as long — though don't worry, I won't about a book when I found the actual experience of it, at the time, to be so often gruelling or tedious.

But it may just be the case that reading about Clarissa is, in the end, a lot more interesting than reading about Clarissa. Author 13 books For people who haven't seen the haiku version : To Miss Howe: send help! I've been ravished in Book Six with three more to go.

When I was a little girl, I dreamed of being a nun or a convict. In my romanticized view, both situations provided a room and isolation. What more could anyone want? Space and isolation: the perfect ingredients to read endlessly and without interruption.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth, and my notions about being a convict were particularly skewed. Though critics, such as V.

Clarissa is ill equipped to deal with her hostile environment — a world of materialism and hypocrisy. She operates by a strict code of moral conduct, and her disinclination to adapt guarantees her downfall--at least by the norms of her society.

Richardson creates here a mindscape rather than a landscape. In this blank world, the details that remain—a desk, a key, a lock, a room, a coffin, etc. From the beginning, the images used form a pattern of obstruction and closure.

The female code of conduct in the eighteenth century creates blockage as well. For example, women were not able to able to express their feelings during courtship. A humorous illustration of the problem this code creates occurs with Arabella and Lovelace. Clarissa is a tragic heroine, pressured by her unscrupulous nouveau-riche family to marry a wealthy man she detests. When she is tricked into fleeing from her family's designs with the dashing and witty Robert Lovelace, she inadvertently places herself in the power of an inveterate rake, perhaps the most charming villain in English literature.

It's the magic of Clarissa that the lovers seduce the readers' imagination as much as any in our literature, including Romeo and Juliet. From this we have Dr Johnson's famous verdict, noted by Boswell: "Why, sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story… you would hang yourself… you must read him for the sentiment.

The genius of Richardson's narration is not simply the innovative use of epistolary fiction — the novel is told through a complex web of letters — but also the subtlety with which he unfolds the dark tragedy of Clarissa's fatal attraction to Lovelace. All too human in her capacity for self-deception in matters of sex, she finds his charm impossible to resist. It's the unique spell of the book that her fiercely protested virtue is tinged with intimations of unacknowledged desire.

Clarissa Harlowe also sets the gold standard for English fictional heroines. She is beautiful, intelligent, high-principled, resolute and proud, with deep humanity. A Marxist critic would also point out that she is profoundly middle class. Her tragedy is to become the victim of a man who will imprison, drug and ultimately rape her.

Lovelace is equally divided. Curated Bundles. Children's Gifts. Stocking Fillers. Penguin Tote Bags. Isokon Penguin Donkey. View more editions. Buy from. Read more. Share at. More from this Author. Pamela Samuel Richardson. About the Author. Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more. Please enter an email.

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