Consequently, our attention is not on what happened but instead on what the different characters believe happened, or even what they believe from one moment to the next. Evidence, after all, is perpetually trickling in, filtered through mood and different perceptual biases. Characters may misrepresent their own feelings or actions; Lovelace frequently lies. It is important to notice, though, that each of the two main characters, Clarissa and Lovelace, promise to their correspondents, Anna Howe and John Belford, that they will tell them the truth as far as they know it.

Both Lovelace and Clarissa return obsessively to reconstructions of a past that can never be laid to rest because it can never be objectively known or described. The letters function—for each—as a kind of history, a possible basis for interpreting the course of events leading up to the fictional present. They inhabit a world where reality resides only in text, in letters, and in the various ways they can be read and reread. When Clarissa turns over to Belford the collection of letters that constitutes her part of the novel, it is for the purpose of establishing the truth for her community and by implication for all readers, now and forever. Her correspondence functions as evidence. For Clarissa, “the pen is a witness on record” (L183).

Much of what Richardson himself considered to be the excessive length of his novel arises thematically out of this uncertainty over what actually happened and why. Notice that the novel begins with Anna Howe asking what passed between Lovelace and her brother that caused the domestic crisis that propels the novel. The opening duel is visited and revisited by all the characters until the concluding duel puts an end to all speculation. The time bracketed by the two duels represents a temporal nexus where future and past cross and recross.

Length arises too out of Clarissa and Lovelace’s shared belief in the efficacy of delay. Once one commits to a particular course, then the number of available options necessarily diminishes. But delay offers opportunity to investigate alternative courses, to gather advice, to reexamine evidence, and most important, to change one’s mind.

As in soap opera, the characters in this novel live suspended in thought and supposition, having no employment beyond accounting for the past and speculating on the future. They talk, they write, they feel, they plan, and above all, they manipulate one another and the facts of their shared existences.

For Clarissa and Lovelace the prime manipulations involve time and love or, if not love, then attraction. Clarissa admits to Anna Howe that she feels for Lovelace a “conditional kind of liking” (L28). The condition in question involves Lovelace’s reformation. His values, those of the rake, conflict violently with her own, those of the pure maiden. If he is to have her, he must reform. Re-form. Rather than loving the man he is, she loves the man he must become in the future in order to justify that love.

Meanwhile, Lovelace sets up his own conditions for Clarissa. Her virtue must be tested, not once but twice. If “ruined,” he predicts, she will behave like all the other women whose virtue he has tried: She will accommodate herself to her situation and will grow to love him. Like Clarissa’s, his “love” is based on a mistaken concept of the person the beloved might become rather than who that beloved is at the present moment.

Their conflicting values necessarily pull them in opposing directions, an oppositional dynamic that is underscored by their radically different conceptions of time. For Lovelace, time is an open-ended stream and can therefore be carefully navigated to his own advantage. His repeated phrase “a wife at any time” (L99) illustrates that for him marriage is always an option, though one that he hopes he will not be forced into. Whatever happens, with this one stroke he will always be able to “mend” his transgression against Clarissa. In this essentially comic view of existence, bad actions in the present are not necessarily visited by bad consequences in the future.

For Clarissa time is a closed-ended narration, even a tragedy. She underscores the irrevocability of time’s linear trajectory when she asks Lovelace, “Canst thou call back time?” (L266). The question is rhetorical; she knows he cannot call time back, although he never agrees this is so.

This fundamental disagreement concerning the nature of time, taking place over time, deepens the widening abyss between them and fuels the dramatic tension that ultimately consumes them both.