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Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1748) by Samuel Richardson is the longest novel in the English language — approximately one million words in its first edition — and one of the most formally ambitious novels ever written. It is organized as an exchange of letters between the major characters (primarily Clarissa Harlowe and her friend Anna Howe; and the libertine Robert Lovelace and his friend John Belford), and it follows the story of Clarissa Harlowe, a young woman of exemplary virtue whose family is trying to force her into a mercenary marriage with a man she despises. To escape this situation, she accepts an offer of help from the brilliant, dangerous Lovelace, who instead imprisons and rapes her, after which she refuses to marry him (even to legitimize her situation) and dies, having achieved in death the moral perfection that life in the eighteenth century would not allow. Richardson's achievement is the psychological and moral depth he brings to both Clarissa and Lovelace through the epistolary form: we inhabit both characters' consciousness in a way unprecedented in fiction before Richardson.
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Clarissa (1748)
Complete Clarissa Book List
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Clarissa
Samuel Richardson·1748
Clarissa — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Clarissa actually the longest novel in English?
Clarissa is generally cited as the longest novel in the English language, at approximately 969,000 words in its first edition (1747-48) and even longer in the revised third edition (1751), which added prefaces, postscripts, and additional letters. For comparison, War and Peace is approximately 580,000 words; Middlemarch is approximately 300,000. Most modern readers read Clarissa in an abridged edition — Angus Ross's Penguin Classics edition, approximately 540,000 words, is the standard abridged text — which omits some of the later material while preserving the novel's essential structure and moral argument. Reading the full text is a significant undertaking but one that rewards those who commit to it.
Why doesn't Clarissa just marry Lovelace after he rapes her?
This is the question contemporary readers asked — Richardson received many letters from readers urging him to let Clarissa marry Lovelace and achieve a conventional happy ending. Richardson refused, and the refusal is the novel's moral point: Clarissa does not marry Lovelace because she would not be choosing him freely, and freedom of choice in marriage is, for Richardson's Clarissa, not negotiable. Her position is that the rape has not changed her moral assessment of Lovelace — she knew before it that he was not a man she could respect or love — and that marrying him to regularize a situation she has been forced into would be a form of complicity in her own violation. The novel's contemporary readers found this reasoning perverse; many modern readers find it the most morally serious position a character in eighteenth-century fiction takes.
What is Robert Lovelace's appeal?
Lovelace is one of the great literary villains, but he is also one of the great literary seducers — brilliant, witty, self-aware about his own villainy, and capable of genuine feeling even while being incapable of acting on that feeling. His letters to Belford are among the most psychologically revealing documents in eighteenth-century fiction: he knows that he is destroying someone he admires, he cannot stop himself, and he anatomizes his own behavior with a precision that makes him fascinating rather than simply terrible. Many readers of Clarissa have noted that Lovelace's letters are more entertaining than Clarissa's, which is part of Richardson's point: the libertine sensibility has an energy and a wit that virtue cannot match, and the novel is partly about the cost of that asymmetry.
How does Clarissa end?
Clarissa dies — slowly, peacefully, and with extraordinary dignity, having ordered her own coffin and prepared for death as a release from a world that has used her badly. Her death is presented as a moral triumph rather than a defeat: she refuses Lovelace's final offer of marriage, forgives him and everyone else who has harmed her, and dies in a state of exemplary Christian peace. Lovelace, learning of her death, is destroyed by it — he eventually dies in a duel, apparently welcoming the death that his guilt and his loss have made desirable. The ending is Richardson's argument that virtue is real, that it is possible even in the most degraded circumstances, and that Clarissa's death is a form of victory rather than a defeat — an argument that not all readers have accepted.
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