A huge success when it first appeared in 1747, and translated into French and German, it remains one of the greatest of all European novels. Told through a complex series of interweaving letters, Clarissa is a richly ambiguous study of a fatally attracted couple and a work of astonishing power and immediacy.
And yet, Clarissa finds his charm alluring, her scrupulous sense of virtue tinged with unconfessed desire. Lovelace, however, proves himself to be an untrustworthy rake whose vague promises of marriage are accompanied by unwelcome and increasingly brutal sexual advances. Pressured by her unscrupulous family to marry a wealthy man she detests, the young Clarissa Harlowe is tricked into fleeing with the witty and debonair Robert Lovelace and places herself under his protection. "Oh thou savage-hearted monster! What work hast thou made in one guilty hour, for a whole age of repentance!" Clarissa is one of the grand masterpieces of European literature
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