One week gained!

Clarissa read-along: Letters 56 to 72

Mar 31, 2023

Dear friends,

Clarissa has been granted a week’s reprieve from dreaded confinement at uncle Anthony’s moated manor. It’s joyous news for Clarissa, but time will tell whether it proves quite as enjoyable for the reader. Could this simply be another way for Richardson to delay the action?

In a small twist this week, Clarissa offered to transfer her inheritance and let Solmes marry sister Bella instead. Unsurprisingly, the idea was swiftly refused. Uncle John was initially sympathetic but cautioned our Clarissa against using sharp wit in her pleas, admitting he fears that she will show up the family, “as so many fools.” It’s almost as if John knows they are in the wrong; afraid they will be convinced by her reason. He reminds Clarissa that, “husbands are sometimes jealous of their authority with witty wives.” If she’s to make a success of marriage, Clarissa needs to tone herself down. She’s being suffocated by bad options:

“Tossed to and fro by the high winds of passionate control, and, as I think, unreasonable severity, I behold the desired port, the single state, which I would fain steer into; but am kept off by the foaming billows of a brother’s and sister’s envy; and by the raging winds of a supposed invaded authority; while I see in Lovelace, the rocks on the one hand, and in Solmes, the sands on the other; and tremble lest I should split upon the former, or strike upon the latter.”

This is a nice lyrical passage, of which I wish there were more. Of course, the prose gets a lot more exciting in the hands of Lovelace whose passion overspilled this week causing Clarissa to get properly cross for the first time. After discovering Lovelace’s fondness for the local Rosebud, we’ve been on a rollercoaster about his honour. Acquitted in Anna’s most recent letter, she wonders if his noble actions might be a ploy to improve his chances with Clarissa.

The price of Clarissa’s reprieve is an interview with Solmes: a man whose letters are peppered with errors and who has openly spoken about the importance of fear in making women obedient. “Coy maids make fond wives,” says Solmes, “Terror and fear… look pretty in a bride, as well as in a wife.” It is reported to Anna that, “it should be his occasion for that fear, if he could not think he had the love… the man who made himself feared fared best!” None of this looks good for his future wife. Anna warns Clarissa that if she should end up his bride, she must pretend all her prior actions to him came from, “reserve only.”

Anna’s letters always offer relief, both for the Clarissa and the reader. Some of her best remarks this week reveal how courtship provides women only a brief moment of power:

“I shall watch how the imperative husband comes upon him; how the obsequious lover goes off; in short, how he ascends, and how I descend the matrimonial wheel.”

And humorously reflect on the mother daughter relationship:

“She says I am too witty; Anglicè too pert: I that she is too wise; that is to say, being likewise put into English, not so young as she has been: in short is grown so much into mother that she has forgotten she ever was a daughter”

Did you have any favourite moments this week?

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