Scan barcode
A review by friendofgosig
Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson
4.0
This book is long. It took me eighty hours to read, across about a year. Was it worth it? Yes. Would I recommend it? It really depends what you are expecting. It is long and sometimes tedious, but even as I read it, sometimes I wanted more. Towards the end Richardson starts summarising and omitting letters, reasoning that the account was extending to too great a length, and I felt cheated. Richardson sets out to record in minute detail all the events, plots, emotions and decisions that lead our two main characters to their fate, and there is something satisfying and inevitable about the whole thing. As Richardson writes in the postscript: “the length then must add proportionally to the pleasure that every person of taste receives from a well-drawn picture of nature.”
When I started reading this book I knew how it ended, but it was fascinating to imagine reading it and not knowing, using the evidence presented to guess at the ending, to take what we know about these characters to the extreme resolution. To hope that characters will relent, that the tragic end could be averted.
Usually I despise preachy books, and this book is all about the moralising, but there are enough other characters to balance Clarissa’s goodness (Lovelace’s letters are inevitably the most entertaining), and each is rewarded at the end according to their merit. Richardson argues that the idea of a reformed rake is a romantic nonsense, and proves it when even the most virtuous of women can’t reform Lovelace’s character, but as she does succeed in reforming his friend Belford, Lovelace could become the exception that proves the rule.
When I started reading this book I knew how it ended, but it was fascinating to imagine reading it and not knowing, using the evidence presented to guess at the ending, to take what we know about these characters to the extreme resolution. To hope that characters will relent, that the tragic end could be averted.
Usually I despise preachy books, and this book is all about the moralising, but there are enough other characters to balance Clarissa’s goodness (Lovelace’s letters are inevitably the most entertaining), and each is rewarded at the end according to their merit. Richardson argues that the idea of a reformed rake is a romantic nonsense, and proves it when even the most virtuous of women can’t reform Lovelace’s character, but as she does succeed in reforming his friend Belford, Lovelace could become the exception that proves the rule.