The Female Jailor and Female Rivalry in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa

Abstract

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In Samuel Richardson's landmark novel, Clarissa (1748-49), the eponymous heroine escapes the arranged marriage her parents have tried to force her into only to be abducted and imprisoned by the aristocratic rake Lovelace. She ultimately reforms him—but after he rapes her and she languishes away for several hundred pages, mourning the loss of her virginity and chastising him via a steady stream of epistles (the book contains a total of nine volumes and 547 letters).