Week 13: To the end of Letter 497, Lovelace to Belford, September 9Ĭharles Landseer, “Clarissa Harlowe in the Prison Room of the Sheriff’s Office,” 1833. Week 12: To the end of Letter 457, Belford to Lovelace, Sunday evening, September 3 Week 11: To the end of Letter 416, Lovelace to Belford, August 21 Week 9: To the end of Letter 315, Clarissa to Anna Howe, July 8 Week 8: To the end of Letter 257, Lovelace to Belford, June 13 Week 7: To the end of Letter 228, Lovelace to Belford, Thursday evening, June 8 Week 6: To the end of Letter 194, Lovelace to Belford, Saturday, May 20 Week 5: To the end of Letter 147, Arabella Howe to Clarissa, Friday, April 21 Week 4: To the end of Letter 99, Lovelace to Belford, Tues-Weds, April 11-12 Week 3: To the end of Letter 78, Clarissa to Anna, Tuesday evening Week 2: To the end of Letter 44, Clarissa to Anna, Wednesday morning, 9 o’clock Week 1: To the end of Letter 18, Clarissa to Anna, Saturday March 4 th

See below for a preliminary reading schedule.Ĭlarissa, in Lockdown, Together: A Summer Reading Group Once we have a committed group of participants, we will develop a more detailed schedule of meetings and experiences. If you are interested in participating, please contact Deidre Lynch ( ) and Yoon Sun Lee ( ) by June 7 th. We hope to begin, with everyone using the Penguin or Everyman editions, on Friday June 12 th.

Those meetings will be supplemented by a blog for the group, hosted on Wordpress, which will receive postings on an almost-daily basis and which will serve as a durable record of our collective reading experience. Over fourteen weeks, as we read about 100 pages a week, or 15 pages a day, the group will hold roughly seven Zoom meetings. To foster the intellectual community that so many of us are longing for at this moment of social distancing, we are forming a reading group “ Clarissa, in Lockdown, Together.” The reading group will involve both synchronous and asynchronous elements. It is newly apparent that Clarissa has lessons to teach us, as well, about mediation and communication and time’s duration and unevenness.

The novel’s treatment of sexual ethics and gender inequity was already, pre-pandemic, topical for the #Me-Too era. And what Richardson does with the letter form speaks very well, almost eerily so, to our present moment of isolation and our reliance on technology to bridge distances, with Zoom representing for the 21 st century what the post office represented for the 18 th. Summer 2020 is a moment when many of us are finding the experience of long, immersive novels to be sustaining in entirely new ways. At just under 1500 pages in the oversized Penguin Classics edition-and 100 hours on Audible- reading or listening to Clarissa can be an intimidating task, even more so alone. Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel Clarissa, an epistolary epic of intimate life, is a formidable book. Hosted by Deidre Lynch ( ) and Yoon Sun Lee ( )

Clarissa samuel richardson pages