The ferocity of Clarissa and Lovelace’s conditional love leaves behind an afterglow that no reader can ever quite forget.

II

“And I have run into such a length!—And am such a sorry pruner, though greatly luxuriant, that I am apt to add three pages for one I take away!”

—Samuel Richardson3

An abridgment necessarily reduces or all but eliminates the important fact of the characters’ mental and psychological restlessness concerning the nature of reality. Their iteration and reiteration of the past, after all, is their life’s blood.

Certainly too what the abridger removes from the text depends on her/his sensibilities, preconceptions, and assumptions. In effect the text in the reader’s hands represents the abridger’s interpretation of the text, much as the orchestral performance heard by a music lover represents not so much what the composer wrote as how the orchestra leader interprets that work.

My own abridgment was inspired by that of Philip Stevick, now out of print;4 both his edition and mine use Richardson’s first edition as source and approach the text not just as an historical artifact but as a work of art. Our view is that the second and third editions are not only longer than the first, but suffer aesthetically from the incessant advice of Richardson’s friends and readers, not all of which he was able to ignore. My method was to approach the full version of the first edition, using Angus Ross’s excellent 1985 Penguin edition, and to do so with a mind as open as possible, gradually pruning away what I found extraneous and preserving what seemed essential.

To some extent the essential had to do with practical matters, the most obvious of these being continuity. I wanted the abridgment to read smoothly, as if nothing had been excised. But I also worked to include the passages most often discussed in the critical discourse that surrounds Clarissa.

I removed sentences, paragraphs, and entire letters while preserving the language, as well as the sequence of paragraphs, the placement of paragraph breaks, and the order of significant events. In rare cases I deleted words within a sentence; these omissions are indicated with ellipses. I pruned whatever seemed repetitious without effect or moralistic without thought. I likewise removed many minor characters, though probably the sense of a fictional community suffers by such trimming. The Tomlinson plotline I removed entirely.

All this clearing away of shrubbery, of course, risks subverting Richardson’s intention and accomplishment. The well-intentioned gardener, therefore, approaches her task with both humility and hubris: humility at laying violent hands on a classic, and hubris at the possibility that all this clearing away of overgrowth and undergrowth may actually reveal more clearly the design and shape of the original garden.

III

My own most memorable realization was the important role Anna Howe plays in the novel. Previous abridgments without exception reduced the significance of Anna Howe, instead casting a bright light on the struggles of the two principals, Lovelace and Clarissa.5 This binary reading, I believe, fails to recognize that the central power struggle is actually a three-way conflict, an unstable dynamic providing more psychological complexity and dramatic tension. Richardson himself once confessed, “I love Miss Howe next to Clarissa.”6

Anna Howe plays an active role in the fiction by observing the action, listening to Clarissa, and offering advice. Repeatedly she urges Clarissa to assume the estate her grandfather left her and so cut her ties of dependence with both her family and Lovelace. Anna is really urging revolution, though she and the other characters recognize independence is an inappropriate goal for a young lady of family and fortune. At the beginning of the novel and repeatedly throughout it, Clarissa expresses a deep longing for independence and the single life. Yet she understands that setting up housekeeping would be a bold and potentially dangerous step. Her conventional side cannot resolve on angering or even litigating with her father over assumption of her estate.

Anna, who, as she confesses, risks nothing, can easily imagine herself in Clarissa’s place, embracing independence:

I’d be in my own mansion, pursuing my charming schemes and making all around me happy. I’d set up my own chariot. I’d visit them when they deserved it. But when my brother and sister gave themselves airs, I’d let them know that I was their sister, and not their servant; and if that did not do, I would shut my gates against them; and bid them be company for each other. (L27)

Lovelace recognizes that Clarissa’s moods and decisions are shaped by the stream of correspondence from Anna Howe, and he acknowledges to Belford Miss Howe’s importance and power. Having intercepted several letters from her to Clarissa, he complains that they are “of a treasonable nature” (L175). In his view, they justify violence. A recurring fantasy is that he will rape both women, suggesting perhaps that he cannot subdue one without subduing both. Possibly he sees them as two aspects of the same person, or as the two together composing the single “double-armed beauty” (L199) known as Miss Clarissa Harlowe.

Other times Lovelace imagines similarities between himself and Anna Howe, who has “too much fire and spirit in her eye indeed, for a girl” (L252). He notes how she loves to tease and bedevil her suitor, Hickman. He even imagines “that that vixen of a girl, who certainly likes not Hickman, was in love with me“ (L201). And in fact, Anna does acknowledge to Clarissa more than once that Lovelace’s spirit is more attractive than Hickman’s torpor and timidity.

When Lovelace examines the relationship between Clarissa and Anna, he is provoked into denying women are capable of friendship.