It's the magic of Clarissa that the lovers seduce the readers' imagination as much as any in our literature, including Romeo and Juliet. 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. Soon, I was swept up in the headlong drama of Clarissa Harlowe's fate – a novel with the simplicity of myth.Ĭlarissa is a tragic heroine, pressured by her unscrupulous nouveau-riche family to marry a wealthy man she detests. Perhaps that's the best way to approach a classic – unawares. In the house where I was staying there was nothing else to read in English I picked it up quite ignorant of its reputation and importance. I first read Clarissa, in France, in a gold-tooled library edition of many volumes. Most critics agree that it is one of the greatest European novels whose influence casts a long shadow. To Samuel Johnson, it was simply "the first book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart". From time to time, its length is challenged by later upstarts – most recently by Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy and Infinite Jestby David Foster Wallace – but Samuel Richardson's "History of a Young Lady" remains an extraordinary achievement. A fter Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe, the next landmark in English fiction is a towering monument of approximately 970,000 words, Clarissa, the longest novel in the English canon.
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