Readers with an interest in both VN and Richardson’s Clarissa will enjoy Lisa Zunshine’s 2006 book entitled Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. In successive chapters, Zunshine (author of Nabokov at the Limits, 1999) considers Clarissa and Lolita, focusing in particular on how readers interact with Lovelace and Humbert.  Here is a taste:

“To [Richardson’s] surprise and disappointment, eighteenth century audiences (particularly the novel’s target audience, women) bought Lovelace’s version of reality. They fell in love with the rake and started demanding of the author that he end the story with a happy marriage between the angelic Clarissa and the man whom Richardson saw as a consummate stalker and rapist” (101).

“An eerily similar fate . . . awaited Nabokov’s Lolita, another novel that challenged its readers’ metarepresentational capacity with its figure of the unreliable narrator. . . . Many readers swallowed Humbert Humbert’s ‘poor truth’ hook, line, and sinker” (101).

Matt Roth

Dear Carolyn,

Call me Abdel.

Indeed, I read Pamela while a student and was one of the very few who enjoyed it –for the wrong reasons perhaps.

Pornographic? Hardly in my recollection, although Richardson was accused of licentiousness. Perhaps you’re thinking of Fielding’s parody Shamela?

The church in VN’s simile refers, of course, to the wedding, the climax of many popular epistolary novels, as in Pamela’s case; and in Aphra Behn’s earlier one, the second part of Love-letters of a Noble Man to his Sister (1685) ends with Silvia heading for a village church.* However, I believe the church also stands for death, as in the case of your beloved Clarissa,** which ends tragically, which also holds for Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther –to name only the most famous ones.

In his commentary to Pushkin’s EO, VN is not entirely dismissive of Richardson’s style –or lack thereof.

A. Bouazza

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* The marriage doesn’t actually take place, but no matter, the reader learns this in Part 3 if s/he has the stamina to follow Behn’s intricate plots.

** I envy your 1^st edition, and the music sheet is certainly a nice touch that didn’t fail to pluck at the strings of my musical mind.