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Title: Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (Penguin Classics) by Samuel Richardson, Angus Ross ISBN: 0-14-043215-9 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: February, 1986 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.04 (24 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Read the UNABRIDGED Clarissa!
Comment: The UNABRIDGED Clarissa (Penguin ed.) is a powerful, moving eighteenth-century English masterpiece, the first great psychological novel. Its length may seem daunting and it does take at least six weeks to read, but you will be rewarded by finding yourself immersed in the minds of Clarissa and Lovelace. You will feel as though you are living in their world, facing their moral dilemmas, deciding on courses of action, predicting consequences. However, if you accidentally pick up the Sherburn ABRIDGEMENT of Clarissa, you will NOT be able to savor Richardson's famous "writing to the moment." If you doubt me, take a look at Mary Anne Doody and Florian Stuber's article, "Clarissa Censored," in the journal Modern Language Studies (1988). The abridgement is a travesty of Richardson's greatest novel.
Rating: 3
Summary: If You Are An English Student...
Comment: ...you'll probably appreciate (and perhaps even enjoy)this novel. As other reviewers have noted, it is impossible to read many novels post-1750 without acknowledging the impact that Richardson's novel has had on English literature.
It should be noted that the abridged version is indeed unacceptable for the simple reason that it attempts to purge letters or portions of letters that do not "advance" the plot. Clarissa is not at all about "plot", and if you read it for that purpose you will probably give up long before the conclusion of its 1,500 pages. (I think Samuel Johnson had something to say about that, too...). The unabridged version allows you to form a more nuanced view of many of the characters (including Clarissa herself). If you read the abridged version, prepare to be disappointed at the one-dimensional characterizations.
The (unabridged) novel is, aside from its literary significance, good but not great. If it was a 300 or 400 page novel, I would absolutely encourage people to read the novel. Since it is 1500 pages in length, however, it is really not worth the time that is required to plod through it. If you ARE an English student, by all means spend a summer reading the unabridged version. (You'll probably end up having to read it for class, anyway...I did). For everyone, else, though the unabridged version is just not worth the time, and the abridged version is a poor subsitute.
Rating: 3
Summary: Caveat before tackling this great but weighty novel
Comment: I have to confess to reading this novel partly out of guilt, since I kept coming across references to it elsewhere. While I did enjoy it, it was largely this literary conscience that kept me going. It is indeed a superb novel, and you can read the other reviews to see why, but it is very slow and I think I'm not the only one who found it quite a slog, or got frustrated from time to time by Clarissa's unspeakable virtuousness (although her distraught state after the rape is portrayed most movingly).
As a comparison, read Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses, one of my favourite novels and one which makes one wonder why the epistolary form was abandoned. A beautifully structured, enthralling study of sexual intrigue in eighteenth-century France, it is far more exciting and the characterisation is extraordinary, exploring both good and vicious characters with great depth and achieving the rare feat of making characters at both ends of the scale human, realistic and sympathetic. One of the main differences, apart from the driven plot of Les Liaisons against the thoughtful consideration of what in Clarissa is, classically, basically an expansion of one incident, is that Laclos explored human depravity with such rigorous honesty and fascinated sympathy that he caused a great scandal and got himself banned; Richardson, on the other hand, always had an eye out for the moral lesson (he gives everyone their just deserts at the end in quite a scrupulous manner) and to my mind his portrayal of human nature is less believable, and certainly less interesting. Clarissa would have been far more likeable for a few faults (even Melanie in Gone with the Wind makes a sarcastic comment once), and the interaction with Lovelace would perhaps, I feel, have been deeper and more tragic if she had lowered her standards and communicated with him more.
Clarissa is a densely woven, lovingly detailed novel with a plot that can be summed up in one sentence, and I think that whether it appeals to you depends very much on whether or not this is to your taste. I certainly found it of great interest in relation to other literature and will no doubt dip into it again, but I couldn't face a re-read. One problem with boasting about having finished it is that even though it was much harder work than War and Peace (and twice as long), most people won't have heard of it!
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