The 100 best novels
written in English
No 04
Clarissa
by Samuel Richardson
(1748)
Richardson's Clarissa explores the subtleties of the human heart as its gold-standard heroine falls for one of the most charming villains in literature
Robert McCrum
The Observer, Sunday 13 October 2013 08.00 BST
After The 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 The 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.
Clarissa is a tragic heroine, pressured by her unscrupulous nouveau-riche family to marry a wealthy man she detests. 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. It's the magic of Clarissa that the lovers seduce the reader's imagination as much as any in our literature, including Romeo and Juliet. From this we have Dr Johnson's famous verdict, noted by Boswell: "Why, sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story… you would hang yourself… you must read him for the sentiment."
The genius of Richardson's narration is not simply the innovative use of epistolary fiction – the novel is told through a complex web of letters – but also the subtlety with which he unfolds the dark tragedy of Clarissa's fatal attraction to Lovelace. All too human in her capacity for self-deception in matters of sex, she finds his charm impossible to resist. It's the unique spell of the book that her fiercely protested virtue is tinged with intimations of unacknowledged desire.
Clarissa Harlowe also sets the gold standard for English fictional heroines. She is beautiful, intelligent, high-principled, resolute and proud, with deep humanity. A Marxist critic would also point out that she is profoundly middle-class. Her tragedy is to become the victim of a man who will imprison, drug and ultimately rape her. Lovelace is equally divided. His letters – "I love to write to the moment," he says – are brilliant. But his behaviour is villainous. Modern readers will find his treatment of Clarissa unbearably cruel. Still, softened and humanised, it's not too much of a stretch to see his inspiration standing behind a character like Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.
The first parts of Richardson's masterpiece appeared in 1747-48 and rapidly became cult reading among the new class of English readers. By a neat conjunction, this "history of a young lady" was joined the following year by "the history of… a foundling", the novel (by Richardson's rival, Henry Fielding) better known as Tom Jones. English fiction had come of age. For a century and more, English writers would essentially explore imaginative terrain mapped out by Richardson and Fielding, the co-founders of the modern novel.
Note on the Text:
Richardson was well-known in mid-18th-century London as a leading master printer with a good business in Salisbury Square, just off Fleet Street. He began circulating his new manuscript among friends as early as 1744-45, and published the first edition in two volumes on 1 December 1747, printed on the presses of his own shop. The title page, according to current conventions, announced that Clarissa was "published by the editor of Pamela", and made no reference to Richardson. As an inveterate reviser, but "a poor pruner", he continued to tinker with the text. A second edition appeared in 1749, then a fully revised version in 1751, and finally a fourth edition in 1759, which is usually the basis for modern editions.
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)
003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)
011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
017 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
026 The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
027 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
028 New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)
031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)
038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
055 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)
073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)
078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)
084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)
091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
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