Richardson’s ambitious narrative of tragic seduction is traced through the hundreds of letters written between Clarissa Harlowe, her confidante Anna Howe, the charming, but also cruel and duplicitous seducer Lovelace, and a supporting cast of family and acquaintances. In reading them, we find ourselves slowly absorbed into their individual personalities. Meaning is thus accumulated in each successive letter, but their sequence has its own dramatic structure and tension, maintained for the novel’s length. Through this we are made to confront not only Lovelace’s terrible manipulations, but also his power of allusive evocation, which flow from the same source. In a similar manner, Clarissa triumphantly claims her constant self, virtuous through and beyond death, but is reliant on a complementary capacity for self-deception that uses the measure of her pen to calculate the distance between thought and action in those she observes. Henry James perhaps found in Clarissa a model for his own prose of suspicion. Like Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27), the sheer scale of Clarissa means that it can seem a novel that is more talked about than read. Yet for those readers who are prepared to spend time with it, Clarissa offers a proportionate amount of satisfaction. DT