Reviews

Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson

onesownroom's review

 - - - - -
STARTED READING: January 2012
SET ASIDE: March 2012
NOTES: THIS BOOK IS SCARY & IT FELL ON MY FACE. Seriously, it's like 1500 pages long. It's a BRICK. I was trying to marathon with some friends & it went too fast and was TOO LONG AND THE PRINT WAS TOO TINY. BUT, it was actually pretty good.

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howtoreadmore's review

challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

bookstalgic's review

reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

rainbow1218's review

challenging reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

sherwoodreads's review against another edition

Reread: no change

Once you accept the lugubrious plot of the longest English novel (pure and innocent girl is Wronged, fades away into angelic death) this book is fascinating on so many levels.

Apparently Richardson worked on it for years. And that includes after initial publication--he amended it significantly twice, after reading both published and private reviews. Unfortunately his emendations mostly were additions to hammer the point home that no, Clarissa realio trulio was saintly and pure and good and submissive (and therefore must die), and Lovelace a devil in thin disguise, adding on massive wordcount to shove readers firmly into accepting his judgment. He was appalled that many readers liked Lovelace, and wanted a happy ending for them both.

The thing is, the book is great--still great--in spite of that hammer.

First of all, the reader can watch the invention of the English modern novel as this book develops. Richardson plays around with narrative voice, POV, dialogue and dialogue attributions as he tries to juggle the inner and outer lives of all his characters. The result, I think, is fascinating: narrative commentary, footnotes, play format, stream of consciousness, omniscient narrator, third person limited, and of course first person epistolary make up a splendid tapestry of narrative experimentation made lively by irony here, passion there.

Then there is the historical context. The close reader will discover customs and attitudes of the time that all the characters accept as givens, but which we will find peculiar, enlightening, horrifying, and sometimes bewildering. Expressions we think we understand have origin meanings now forgotten, for example, "raising a family." Very, very important concept--but it's not about educating one's children so much as using education as one of the many tools to boost one's family into a higher social realm. So children are expected, as their duty to their parents, to raise the family--boys by doing great things in the world and girls by marrying up.

Finally, and most intriguingly, there is the battle of the sexes. When the reader reflects on the central turning point of the book being a rape, suddenly Richardson's quaint language and people in their wigs and laces transform into moderns, facing the complex tensions of male-female relations now.

Richardson wants us to believe that a good girl is obedient and submissive, first to her father (and brothers) and then to her husband. Her purity is her single most important commodity. If we look past that absurdity (which we have been struggling against for the centuries since), what we have here is a novel about agency.

Jane Austen picked up on this when she began writing, with her assumption that what women think matters--that their lives are not solely about holding onto their "purity" until marriage. I say "picked up" because Jane Austen's work is in dialogue with Richardson's; he, though a male author, possessed enough sympathy and understanding of women to have created a cast of interesting females.

However much we might roll our eyes at Clarissa's six hundred pages of dedicated "I have lost my purity so I must die" at the end of the novel, we can still feel for her because Richardson created a smart character with wit and determination. At the wise age of eighteen she tries to be submissive to her parents--in the very beginning, we learn that her grandfather had left her a significant fortune, which she promptly signs over to her father because she is a good, submissive girl.

Unfortunately for Clarissa, her father is a pompous fatwit, and her brother is even worse--his letters to her are full of innuendo about how she must submit to the loathsome Soames, that she must be mastered, that marriage will snuff out her pertness . . . using the language of rape.

Readers of the time were riveted; letters and memoirs then, and since, are full of oblique references to what goes on in the family home when brothers are taught that they are the masters of young sisters, until Virginia Woolf decided to spell it out bluntly.

And that's the key, I think: in the parade of twits and hypocrites and spiteful sisters and overbearing parents and vile sneaks (who once, when young, had hopes of a good life but were tricked and lied to) we find the traces of people, and problems, we know now. Pretending they don't exist doesn't make them go away.

At the novel's center is the vexing snarl of questions about the nature of love, attraction, obsession and possession, and above all, trust. Clarissa might eventually have been wooed into loving Lovelace--she did find him handsome and witty--but he betrayed her trust, and he could never be made to understand that. And his reasons for the rape are more complicated than you'd think.

Obviously it takes time to read. That's daunting to today's life in the fast lane. But I believe every literature lover ought to read it once, and do it when there are others to discuss it with. And you might find it a whole lot more entertaining than you would have thought: it was not only a best-seller in England, but it was fast translated into other European languages, and had a profound effect on a variety of artists, including Mozart. (Listen to Don Giovanni again after reading this book.)

Though the language and customs are so very mid-eighteenth century, the emotions and motivations are resonantly relevant, and the book can spark endless debate. And thereby--one hopes--enlightenment. We humans certainly have a long way to go.

lulumoss's review

3.0

As a story, it was a good one. As far as implementation of the story though? Yikes. 1500+ pages of OH I CAN'T - OH YOU MUST - OH I CAN'T - OH YOU MUST... I have to admit I did skim a BIT, sometimes. Perhaps I'm ruined by modern attention-span deficiencies and loose morals, but I really lost patience with Miss Clarissa and her "dying of grief". I wanted to shout at her: get over yourself. But if she had, then I suppose we wouldn't have this book, we'd have some sort of novella.

It's in the form of letters, and as they begin in January and run through to December I thought it would be fun to read them in real-time, sort of, 200-odd years too late, but they grew less frequent after mid-September so I just mashed on and finished it up.

Would I recommend it? Sure, IF you're prepared for a LOT of repetition, a LOT of 'woe is me', and a lot of 18th century moralizing.

mwperez's review

4.0

So it turns out I actually ended up loving Clarissa? I almost want to apologize to Richardson for mocking Sir Charles so much, but I really do think this is a much stronger novel. It took about 800 pages for me to really enjoy it, but somehow I became deeply invested in Clarissa's struggle against, well, basically everyone and anyone she encounters.

It's interesting to compare Clarissa's heroism to the many heroines modeled after her that followed this novel. While she certainly shares their aspects of piety, humility, filial duty, and patience, what struck me most about Clarissa was her constant, desperate struggle for control and agency over her own life. Eventually this became so compelling I could hardly put the book down, even after her

Spoiler

death

. Her

Spoiler

will and concern for her corpse

continued the fight into the

Spoiler

grave

, no less dramatically than her struggle during her

Spoiler

life

.

This wouldn't be the first book from this period that I'd recommend to someone, but I understand better now why it had such an incredible impact. I think if you enjoy 18th and early 19th century novels, Clarissa provides a long but (eventually) worthwhile read and crucial context for later works.

amandumb's review

5.0

oh my god.

I decided that I needed to update this review because I have legitimately thought about this book every day for the past seven months. I think Clarissa fundamentally changed who I am as a reader and student of literature. It certainly reshaped my definition of what a masterpiece truly is. It is probably the best novel I’ve ever read, or at least the best interplay of narrative contents and the novel form that I’ve ever seen. I have way too many thoughts about the symbolism of the epistolary form and its relation to the human heart to put in a Goodreads review, but suffice to say that this book feels profoundly human—I felt, and still feel, the emotional damage at a physical level. Clarissa is what a book should be, and I would never ever recommend it to anyone.

virtualmima's review

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No

2.25

A story of male entitlement, featuring a serial predator who abducts and rapes a young girl. As a concept it could have been a good book, but there was no reason for it to be so long and so boring. Also all the preachiness about "virtue" was annoying.

It's also messed up the way people back then wrote fanfictions where they revised the ending so that it ended in a happy marriage between Lovelace and Clarissa, and Richardson's choice of everyone dying in the end sparked outrage among fans who for some reason thought this was a romantic novel.

mdrosend's review

challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.25