Pamela Vainottuna

One of the first English novels, and still among the most provocative. Pamela Andrews is a fifteen-year-old servant girl whose kind mistress dies, leaving her at the mercy of the young master, Mr. B. What begins as promising benevolence curdles into sexual harassment, then kidnapping, then something stranger still: a psychological siege conducted through letters. Pamela records every moment of her ordeal in desperate dispatches to her parents, her virtue her only weapon in a world where a servant girl's body is considered fair game. Richardson invented the novel as we know it, and this is the book that made England whisper. Its "virtue rewarded" ending, Mr. B. reformed, Pamela elevated to mistress of the estate, has troubled readers for three centuries. Is it a triumph of feminine resistance or a fantasy of complicity? Read it and decide.