Clarissa Harlowe, or the History of a Young Lady - Volume 5

Volume 5 finds Clarissa Harlowe in ruins. The man she fled to for protection has destroyed her. Now she lies dying in a London boarding house, her family still refusing to forgive her, her letters the only record of her suffering and her unshakeable moral courage. Through letters to her confidante Anna Howe and desperate appeals to her estranged family, Clarissa documents her slow decline with a strange, terrible composure. Lovelace, ever the manipulator, schemes to see her one last time, desperate to obtain her forgiveness before she dies. The novel that shocked eighteenth-century readers with its frank examination of sexual violence and female vulnerability remains devastating: a young woman's principled refusal to bend, even as society, family, and one monstrous man close around her. Richardson gives Clarissa no easy consolations, no redemptive reunion. Just the dignity of her principles and the terrible clarity of her decline. It is the novel'sw most punishing and most transcendent volume.