Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded Volume 2

One of the most consequential novels in English literature, 'Pamela' invented the form we now recognize as the novel. When fifteen-year-old servant girl Pamela Andrews resists her master's attempted seduction, she is imprisoned in his remote estate. What unfolds is a dramatic epistolary narrative told through her letters: her defiance, her fear, her growing and troubling entanglement with the man who holds her captive. Richardson's genius lies in making a servant girl's inner life, the smallest humiliations, the quietest triumphs, the stuff of serious literature. Volume II continues Pamela's story after her marriage, exploring whether virtue truly triumphs or whether the price of reward is something more complicated than a happy ending. It divided eighteenth-century readers, and it still divides us today.