Clarissa

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From The New Yorker, May 16, 2016:

The Man Who Made The Novel: Loving And Loathing Samuel Richardson
by Adelle Waldman
The New Yorker, May 16, 2016

Son of a carpenter
Formal education ended at age 17
By accident he became a novelist
First novel after age 50
He became the proprietor of a printing press in 1739
Asked to write a “manual” on proper letter-writing
Began writing his first novel in 1739
Two months to produce his first novel, Pamela

Pamela was intended to be instructive. But a novel it was. More than the adventure stories of Daniel Defoe or Jonathan Swift, Pamela was concerned with the representation of interior life.

It is also organized around a single, unified plot, which distinguished it from Defoe’s more episodic Moll Flanders (1722), a pseudo-memoir that recounts its protagonist’s varied and largely illicit pursuits, from her inauspicious beginnings through her late years in the colonies.

The 100 best novels: #4 -- Clarissa by Samuel Richardson, 1748. Link to The Guardian, October 14, 2013.

After 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. From time to time, its length is challenged by later upstarts – most recently by Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace – but Samuel Richardson's "History of a Young Lady" remains an extraordinary achievement.

To Samuel Johnson, it was simply "the first book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart". Most critics agree that it is one of the greatest European novels whose influence casts a long shadow. I first read Clarissa, in France, in a gold-tooled library edition of many volumes. 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. Perhaps that's the best way to approach a classic – unawares. Soon, I was swept up in the headlong drama of Clarissa Harlowe's fate – a novel with the simplicity of myth.

From Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, by Samuel Richardson (1748), edited with an introduction by John Angus Burrell, c. 1950, The Modern Library, New York, Random House, Inc., from the Introduction, page v:

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