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Suppositional thinking in eighteenth-century literature: authorship, originality, & the female imagination

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Suppositional thinking in eighteenth-century literature: authorship, originality, & the female imagination

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SUPPOSITIONAL THINKING IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE:
AUTHORSHIP, ORIGINALITY & THE FEMALE IMAGINATION

by

Amanda Charlotte Bloom

___________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2016

ii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract iv

Dedication vi

Introduction 1
Richardson’s Readers and the Literary Marketplace
The Many Meanings of “To Suppose”
Chapter Outline

Chapter One: Suppositional Thinking in Clarissa 14
Introduction
I. Clarissa’s Multiverse: Supposition as Barrier to Reason
II. Suppositional Thinking’s Moral Imperative
III. Lovelace’s reflectionings: Suppositional Thinking and Feminine Pantomime
IV. Conclusion

Chapter Two: Supposing Authority: Suppositional Thinking and Richardson’s
Reading Critics 40
Introduction
I. A Lady and a Correspondent: Bradshaigh’s Epistolary Identity
II. Lady Echlin’s Villarusa
III. “a woman without taste!”: or, Richardson’s Reluctant Expansionist
IV. Echlin’s Alternate Ending to Clarissa
V. Conclusion

Chapter Three: Richardson’s Reading Writers: Sarah Fielding, Mary Hays, and
Jane Austen 70
Introduction
I. Richardson and the Fieldings
II. Mary Hays and the Gendered Information Highway
III. Pride, Prejudice, and the Imagination
IV. Conclusion

Afterword 104

Bibliography 112

iii

Acknowledgements

To my parents, Kathy and Jack, and my brother, Mitch, for their superhuman faith in my ability
to complete this program. Those times that I wanted to quit, you didn’t let me. For this reason I
don’t exaggerate when I say this project never could have existed without you. I can only
imagine what I have yet to accomplish with your continued support!

To my illustrious dissertation committee: Emily Hodgson Anderson (chair), Joseph Dane and
Musicology’s Adam Knight Gilbert. The initial ideas may have been mine, but your feedback
helped take something amorphous and give it legs. And wings.

To Amanda Weldy Boyd, my centipede extraordinaire. You improved my quality of life through
all six years. Our weekly (in the beginning, daily) adventures are what I will miss the most about
graduate school. If only we could bottle your effervescence and enthusiasm, we’d have an elixir
for world peace.

To Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters and Sciences and the Writing Program (John
Holland and Jack Blum) for allowing graduate students to become instructors of record. You
helped me grow as a University instructor long before hitting the job market, which made all of
the difference. Now I have a job immediately after grad school, which truly is a privilege. And to
Lettie Littlejohn and Barbara Leaks, the Writing Program’s den mothers, for fiercely supporting
me and my colleagues.

To English’s Graduate Student Coordinator, Flora Ruiz, for patiently lighting my way through
the program.

iv

Abstract

This dissertation explores the dynamic between Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) and two
subsets of readers: his “reading critics” (Lady Elizabeth Echlin and Lady Dorothy Bradshaigh)
and “reading writers” (Sarah Fielding, Mary Hays, and Jane Austen). I ground my investigation
in these readers’ responses to Richardson’s treatment of what I term “suppositional thinking,”
particularly in his epistolary masterwork Clarissa (1748-51). By the late 1740s the verb “to
suppose” had accumulated numerous subversive denotations, including “to imagine,” “to
coerce,” and “to will into being.” My first chapter argues that in Clarissa Richardson
manipulates these meanings in such a way that casts products of the female imagination
(thoughts, letters, quasi-literary works) into disrepute, mainly as works born of cognitive
processes counter to reason and religion. For Richardson, Clarissa’s efforts “to suppose” – to
wonder, to engage her imagination – undermine her God-given destiny; through this linguistic
sleight-of-hand, he also implies that a reader’s efforts to “suppose” an alternate ending for
Clarissa – and what’s more, to write and to circulate such a thing – violates a sacred, quasi-holy
condition of reading: that of the author’s supreme narrative authority.
My second chapter explores how Richardson’s female correspondents and co-editors –
his “reading critics” – respond to his portrayal of suppositional thinking in Clarissa. As
Richardson’s correspondent and a contemporary reader of Clarissa, Lady Bradshaigh
appropriates his method of deploying suppositional thinking in order to engage Richardson’s
imagination to the point of “seeing” the reason behind her proposed alternative ending to
Clarissa; thus, Bradshaigh challenges Richardson’s thesis that products of the female
imagination (in this case, Bradshaigh’s proposed alternate ending to Clarissa) are opposed to
reason and didactic storytelling. Lady Elizabeth Echlin, her sister, was more in tune with
Richardson both religiously and creatively, and asserted her own quasi-narrative authority
through the actual writing of an alternate ending, a process I explore against the backdrop of her
stoic avoidance of imaginative thinking altogether; by avoiding suppositional thinking and
thereby appearing to commit wholly to a rational, religious form of thinking, I argue that she
enjoyed from Richardson more recognition as a writer than did Lady Bradshaigh, whose
dramatic and hyper-imaginative pleas for an alternate ending to Clarissa Richardson may have
perceived as confirmation of the feminizing and wildly irrational bi-products of the female
imagination.
My third chapter extends the conversation to Richardson’s “reading writers” –
professional eighteenth-century women writers whose works were tremendously influenced by
Richardson’s novels. Structured chronologically, this chapter focuses on Sarah Fielding, Mary
Hays, and Jane Austen, three authors that respond to Richardson’s thesis on imaginative thinking
in disparate yet fascinating ways. First I explore how Sarah Fielding’s pamphlet Remarks On
Clarissa (1754) inspires its female readers to think imaginatively, thereby steering them toward
“correct” readings of literary texts, a thesis that, while respecting Richardson’s narrative
authority, shows that a woman’s imaginative thinking can be beneficial, even restorative; to an
extent, Fielding both supports and challenges Richardson’s handling of suppositional thinking.
Mary Hays and Jane Austen were more direct in challenging the premises that underwrote
Richardson’s thesis on imaginative thinking – mainly, that woman’s imaginative thinking
naturally is opposed to reason. My analysis of Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) initiates
this chapter's concern with gendered information highways, a theme present in Austen’s novels.
My reading of Pride and Prejudice (1813) examines how Austen deploys suppositional thinking

v

to signal when male characters provide female characters with fraudulent social information that
makes them more vulnerable to accepting falsified narratives that put them in danger of making
poor life decisions. Finally, this section of my dissertation argues that Austen recovers
imaginative thinking as a device that – if directed appropriately – can help women achieve self-
knowledge, the key to reason.

vi

Dedication

This project is dedicated to my grandfather:
Kenneth Vernon Moore 1923 – 2010

“You’ll never be struck by lightning if you don’t expose yourself.”

1

Introduction

It is inconceivable how much advantage, in my proud heart, is given me, of peeping into the
hearts of my readers, and sometimes into their heads, by their approbation and disapprobation, of
the different persons in my drama. ~ Samuel Richardson, February 8th, 1754

Engaging readers was Richardson's wheelhouse. Richardson corresponded almost daily

with readers across a vast socioeconomic spectrum, from the relatively uneducated Sarah

Westcomb and Frances Grainger, to London's sophisticated ladies of leisure, among them Lady

Bradshaigh and Lady Echlin. Once a correspondence was initiated, unsolicited drafts of his

work would arrive sporadically on his correspondent's doorstep, attached with notes beseeching

her to share her responses. Richardson's willingness to correspond directly with his female

readers may have been motivated by financial concerns; that is, readers were more likely to

become lifelong subscribers to his works if they enjoyed a felt sense of collaboration. Ladies

would keep reading if they had backstage pass, of sorts if they could claim bragging rights as

a famous author's confidant.

What we do know is that Richardson often solicited these women for help with drawing-

room etiquette and other subjects off-limits to him as a man. As a result, these readers were

invaluable in creating realistic fictional worlds inspired by his Christian moral directive.

Gradually their contributions reached beyond the subjects of etiquette and propriety, breaching

the implied boundary between author and reader by trying to impact his creative decisions a

move that Richardson found exceedingly troubling. They would fill letters with justifications for

sparing a character's life, or for allowing a dashing, dissolute rake to achieve salvation. Our

evidence of their protestations has enhanced studies of eighteenth-century literary culture by

illuminating that readers' responses to literary characters were as proprietary as they are today.

Richardson's contemporary readers did not have access to online fan communities through which

2

they could distribute alternate endings and further adventures for their favorite characters, as

today's readers do, yet they share with them a timeless sentiment: that literary characters present

more potential for adventure than their authors allot.

I. Richardson’s Readers and the Literary Marketplace

In Regulating Readers, Ellen Gardiner explores the shifting balance of power between
male authors and their female readership in the 1740s. The advent of literary property as
immaterial intellectual property was a victory for authors in a time when the literary marketplace
saw readers wresting favorite characters from literary works and refashioning them for new
adventures, which they would circulate among their peers. Established authors (including
Richardson, who called these amateur writers "Poachers in literature") were forced to employ
tactics to restore narrative authority without destroying for readers the emotional connections
that kept them reading; in other words, they devised methods that would encourage readers to
identify with literary characters without viewing them as hostages to their authors' whims, and in
the case of female characters, damsels awaiting rescue. Richardson's poachers were some of the
most vociferous of all, taking ownership of his characters in the public sphere and insisting that
he take seriously their careful annotations of his developing works.
Critics have long situated Richardson's attitude toward women somewhere between male

overlord and proto-feminist. Richardson believed that women readers needed a paternal man to

help guide their reading, as it was widely accepted that women were just as easily seduced by

fiction as Clarissa had been seduced by Lovelace's writing (Gardiner 40). Yet, Richardson was

an outspoken advocate for female education, and ladies from various cross-sections of English

life corresponded with him in ways that defied social norms pertaining to education and class.

Viewed another way, Richardson's correspondence with female readers created a forum through

3

which women readers could flex their creative and intellectual muscles. Susan Whyman argues

that, by engaging in acts of writings that responded to Richardson's own, the eighteenth-century

woman could sharpen her ability to think critically, and independently, about the social,

economic and religious disparities she recognized as impacting her community (56).

In the quote situated at the beginning of this chapter, Richardson speaks fondly of

"peeping into the hearts" of his readers "and sometimes into their heads," a sentiment suggesting

a pipeline between the mind and the emotions, a pipeline that we may distinguish as the female

imagination. Most of Richardson's reader correspondents were women, a fact that lends nearly a

revolutionary spin to the remark. While other male eighteenth-century authors hardly challenged

the misogynist discourse surrounding woman's capacities for literary engagement (Fielding and

Sterne were especially sluggish in this respect), Richardson championed women readers

(particularly English ones) as capable of analyzing fiction and processing the subterranean moral

directives that scaffold it. His outspokenness regarding the value of women's voices in the

crafting of literature was a stunningly liberal move, and the support he showed for female readers

eventually helped prepare them for taking the leap from reader to critic, or even from reader to

writer. I identify these two camps as reading critics (dedicated readers and critics of his works)

and reading writers (readers of his novels that became famous writers, in their own right). These

terms will continue to order my project, as they provide a helpful categorization separating his

generations of readers.

For all the support Richardson lent his reading critics and reading writers, there still was a

great deal of conflict in their correspondence, particularly during the serial publication of

Clarissa, his serial novel distributed between 1747 and1749 in eight volumes. Chronicling the

trials of a virtuous teenager, Clarissa features many harrowing scenes: abduction, rape, and

4

finally, her death. Richardson's point in writing Clarissa was to provide a realistic model of

virtue for his readers, a model that proved so realistic, in fact, that readers came to view Clarissa

not as a model for virtue but as a damsel in need of being rescuing. While he did often learn

from his reading critics' "approbation and disapprobation," Richardson largely ignored their

remonstrations regarding Clarissa's fate; from Richardson's perspective, his sex, age and

experience secured his right to final creative decisions. This was frustrating for many

reading critics, as it burst their sense of being invited into his collaborative bubble and called into

question how sincerely Richardson valued their input. Lady Dorothy Bradshaigh, Richardson's

most vocal reading critic, was dismayed by rumors that Clarissa might die, and her response is

fabled among scholars of eighteenth-century print culture. Among other colorful verbal menaces,

Bradshaigh threatens to “curse” him, promising he will suffer from "the hatred of all the young,

beautiful, and virtuous." She declares that he shall "meet with applause only from envious old

maids, surly bachelors, and tyrannical parents! may [he] be doomed to the company of such and,

after death, may their ugly souls haunt [him]!" (Corr. 35).

Richardson considered Clarissa's death unavoidable, as part of a natural order. That his

readers lobbied against something so natural appalled him to the point of slamming their

protestations as a “Catastrophe.” These readers

by Reason of the distant Publication of two Volumes, and two Volumes, have formed
from the Four a Catastrophe of [their] own; and are therefore the more unwilling to part
with it, in favor of that which [she] think[s] from the Premises of the only natural one.
(Corr.)

Richardson and Bradshaigh debated over how "natural" it was to sentence to death a character

you engendered. For Bradshaigh this was equivalent to sentencing your child to die, thus

implying her understanding of characters as real enough to deserve life and liberty. Richardson's

use of the word “Catastrophe” here codes readerly intervention as against the same natural

5

order that decrees Clarissa's death. In the eighteenth century “Catastrophe” referred primarily to

a disaster, as it does today. However, it also denoted “a disastrous end, finish-up, conclusion”

(referenced in John Gay's 1715 What d'ye call It) and “an event producing a subversion of the

order or system of things,” a secondary meaning used in Daniel Defoe's 1717 Memoirs of the

Church of Scotland and last used in print in 1871 (OED). Readers' attempted appropriation of his

character and her story was subversive indeed, as it troubled another order that Richardson had

found unnatural and inviolable: the top-down dynamic between authors and readers.

According to David Brewer's The Afterlife of Character, Richardson dangled a carrot

that intensely imaginative readers couldn't resist. His letters and novels were "full of invitations

to flesh out his already prolix narratives by imagining the contents of letters to which he, in his

guise as editor, alludes but does not reproduce: the as of yet unpublished portions of the fictional

archive" (4). Richardson was aware that the serial publication of his works encouraged an

attitude among readers that Clarissa's conclusion was up for grabs, if only your Clarissa story

could capture the heart of its author. Brewer claims that Richardson used what he calls "coterie

psychology" to encourage creative collaboration while positioning himself as ringleader. To this

end, he engaged his readers' critical and imaginative capacities to the point of motivating them to

feel like valued associates while discouraging proprietary attitudes that had inspired "an array of

reading practices ...[]... by which the characters in broadly successful texts were treated as if they

were both fundamentally incomplete and the common property of all" (2). His reading critics

were free to imagine, and propose, alternative plots (coined "imaginative expansion" by Brewer)

as long as they recognized Richardson as progenitor of their source material and that they used

his characters in ways that remained loyal to his moralist project. For good measure, Richardson

added coercive footnotes and other appended materials to his fiction for the purpose of steering

6

readers toward so-called correct readings of his texts, and to reinforce the fact that Richardson's

written works originated with him, and him alone.

The proprietary attitudes toward Clarissa to which Brewer and other eighteenth-century

scholars allude probably were encouraged by Clarissa's title page and epistolary structure.

Clarissa's full title (Clarissa, or a History of a Young Lady) paints the narrative not as fiction

but as a history, an account of real events. This novel involves the true “history of the excellent

person whose name it bears" as well as the "the lives, characters, and catastrophes of several

others, either principally or incidentally concerned in the story" (36). By pushing Clarissa's

factual basis, Richardson may have intended to discourage imaginative expansion, reasoning that

if the story is already written, there exists little creative wiggle room. I speculate that

Richardson's editorial choice merely raised the stakes for a more excitable subset of readers; as

Richardson released each volume of Clarissa, readers' sense of impending doom only

heightened, and the suggestion that Clarissa the character was based on a real woman

encouraged, for many readers, a sense that in campaigning for a happy ending they were

complicit in a suspenseful against the clock melee; plus, if a character actually is real, what

claims to ownership can Richardson reasonably make?

Of course, not all readers accepted Clarissa as a chronicle of real events, though recent

advances in cognitive literary theory suggest that our evolved cognitive structure already existed

long before the eighteenth century, and that it has continued to trouble our capacities for

differentiating between real and fictional people. According to cognitive literary theorist

Brian Boyd, fictional texts “test the extent to which the text corresponds to the 'reality' we are

assumed to share.” Because our minds constantly work to gather social information we tend to

have trouble "[distinguishing] between what we have actually read and what we have only

7

inferred" (134). Put another way, our evolved cognitive architecture allows us to become so

absorbed in fiction that we often forget (even if for a short time) that we really aren't floating

down the Mississippi with Huck Finn or dancing the reel alongside Emma Woodhouse and Mr.

Knightley.

Clarissa's epistolary structure (i.e., lack of omniscient narrator) only compounds the

blurring of interpretive boundaries that have challenged our brain's struggle over centuries to

negotiate between fiction and reality. The novel's structure as a compendium of letters means

there exists no intermediary to obstruct the heroine's narrative, to create distance between reader

and character. "Pursued, protected, kissed, buried, wept over, physically assailed, letters in

Richardson are the subject of a drama every bit as enthralling as any merely human adventure

story" (Eagleton 59). According to cognitive literary theorist Lisa Zunshine, Richardson's

epistolary format leaves the reader no arbiter to negotiate between the real and the imaginary

(Narrative 5). This, in turn, made for discrepancies in how readers interpreted literary texts – the

root of Richardson's trouble controlling readerly interpretation and output.

As readers projected their own personal experiences onto Clarissa Harlowe, their

readings of the text diverged wildly from other readers' interpretations and from the moral

Richardson had hoped they may absorb. Ruth Perry notes that Richardson's structural choices for

his novels reflect an intent to infuse it with “the immediacy, suspense, and presentness of a

game,” causing readers to become “caught in the coils" of his narrative and “spirited away from

the moral degeneracy of their period" (123). Richardson's choice to fade deep into

the background of his epistolary works positioned him as 'low profile' editor instead of an

“unwelcome interloper” in the world of his text, thereby sustaining "the power of his fictional

illusion" (Perry). Readers were “called upon to 'live' with the characters and their fate, to go

8

along with their adventures and predicaments, to imagine all possible outcomes” (Coyle 116).

No matter your critical approach, readerly reactions to Richardson's novels provide a

poignant lens through which to explore the novel's impact before the word “novel” even

existed; as all lenses do, it reflects, inflects, and distorts its object, allowing for our own disparate

interpretations as scholars. The legitimacy of making claims for how readers read is always

contentious, though my wide reading in cognitive literary theory suggests that we can

argue that readers share a set of impulses and interpretive strategies that have always mediated

our interactions with the novel. In other words, the way we read now is not dissimilar from the

way eighteenth-century readers read. Putting this in Zunshine's words, we remain thinking of

literary characters as “bodies animated by minds,” thus affecting how we “structure cultural

representations” (36). Referring to Richardson, she points out that by encountering and

interpreting minds in Clarissa, readers for centuries have continued to play a “maddening

and exhilarating social game” putting them in danger of “allowing the 'phantoms of imagination'

too strong a foothold in [their] view of our social world.”

For Richardson, the goal was to coach readers, via acts of reading, into right forms of

thinking, which combined reason with a Christian mandate; his works therefore served as forums

through which Richardson could demonstrate right versus wrong thinking. Accordingly, my

project adopts as its primary focus Richardson's concern with how the female imagination

obstructs woman's capacity for reason. This anxiety plays out quite clearly in Clarissa, as the

heroine's danger increases tenfold as she begins replacing rational reflection with an

intense and isolating form of imaginative thinking. I term this kind of thinking suppositional

thinking, as Richardson often deploys the verb “to suppose” when demonstrating the female

imagination's incompatibility with reason.

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II. The Many Meanings of ‘To Suppose’

In the eighteenth century the primary definition of to suppose was “to wonder, to imagine”
and the same remains today (OED). However, several other definitions were common in the
1740s, when Richardson wrote Clarissa. These include
1. To feign, pretend; to substitute by artifice or fraud
2. To bring or send by supposing; to coerce
3. To fake a pregnancy for personal gain
4. To commit fraudulent acts, to forge
5. To attribute to, to give credit (OED)
Definition #1 was in use when Richardson published Clarissa whereas “to fake a pregnancy” had
largely faded by then, but I include it here because words tend to reverberate through time and it
resonates with the idea of fiction as parented by authors and readers. Richardson often gave
readers the impression that they also were responsible for a story’s development, as if a storyline
was something to be raised carefully together. This project does not involve sixteenth-century
drama, but its relevance to the word suppose is noteworthy. In the plays of that era, children
inserted into a family in need of an heir often were called "supposes" (fake heirs = “to fake a
pregnancy”). The 1566 play The Supposes, a translation of Ariostos' "I Suppositi" and the source
text for Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, concerns a subplot in which Cleander discovers that
his servant Dulipo (disguised as Damon) is actually his long lost son. To illustrate definition # 2,
the OED offers Clarissa’s remark that her parents’ objective is to suppose her “into their will,”
placing the height of its usage somewhere in the mid-eighteenth century. Definitions 4 and 5
imbue the verb with startlingly negative connotations that align imaginative output with forgery
and ill repute. Richardson conflates these meanings in Clarissa in order to undermine any claims

10

to his work that overenthusiastic readers were capable of making, a move that his reading critics
and reading writers would respond to for decades to follow.
Discovering Richardson's unique deployment of this verb was exciting, as it activated

many interpretive possibilities within Clarissa and lead me to reconsider numerous questions

regarding Richardson's relationship with his female readers and how they responded to this

opposition between imagination and reason. By revisiting Richardson's correspondence and the

works of fiction produced by women writers who were inspired by his fiction, I discovered that

many such responses exist, ranging from (reading critic) Bradshaigh's wild co-opting of the

language of suppositional thinking to lobby Richardson to revise Clarissa's ending to

(reading writer) Jane Austen's confirmation that woman's imagination (sensibility, if you will)

often obstructed reason, but if tightly harnessed could help them achieve self-knowledge. Not all

these women engage suppositional thinking per say, but they all engage to some extent

imaginative thinking and Richardson's original thesis. In other words, the terms 'suppositional

thinking' and 'imaginative thinking' govern this project. My remaining authors of focus break

down as follows: Lady Elizabeth Echlin (reading critic) and Mary Hays and Sarah Fielding

(reading writers).

Chapter Outline

Chapter One
Chapter one explores Richardson's deployment of suppositional thinking in Clarissa. My
argument hinges on the observation that, for every moment that Clarissa engages in suppositional
thinking, she fails to engage reason. Using key passages from throughout the novel, I show the
interpretive potential for engaging the various definitions of to suppose, specifically in how they
activate questions surrounding Richardson's concerns as a moralist. In my first section, I touch

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on the way Richardson collapses two meanings of to suppose – “to imagine” and “to coerce” – to
demonstrate that poor reason is the primary cause of the Harlowe's ghastly treatment of Clarissa:
to suppose her into their will is to allow the phantoms of their imagination (Clarissa's preference
for Lovelace, for example) to obstruct reason. Next I explore the way Clarissa's suppositional
thinking supplants reason, thereby rendering her more vulnerable to the schemes that determine
her fall. By allowing her thinking to become too guided by supposition, she suffers its paralyzing
effects. My final section explains Richardson's intent to identify supposition thinking as
sacrilegious thinking; Clarissa's engaging it assumes an undue amount of control over her destiny
and signifies her failure to submit wholly to God's plan for her. This concern translates to the
novel's duel concerns over gender and salvation, as Richardson aligns suppositional thinking
with Lovelace's humiliating, feminizing downfall and total damnation, thereby securing
suppositional thinking as innately feminine and thereby opposed to reason.

Chapter Two
Chapter two concerns Richardson's relationship with his reading critics, the set of women
readers who enjoyed a quasi-working correspondence with him, providing advice on fashion and
etiquette to enhance the realism of his novels. This chapter is split into two sections: the first
concerns Lady Dorothy Bradshaigh, and the second, Lady Elizabeth Echlin. In my first section I
demonstrate how Lady Bradshaigh co-opts Richardson's language of suppositional thinking as a
rhetorical device meant to convince Richardson that his didactic aims could never be met by
sentencing Clarissa Harlowe to die. To use suppositional thinking to convince Richardson of the
injustice of Clarissa's fate would mean beating him at his own game, and while her attempts fail
they prove that women readers were aware of his thesis on the female imagination's

12

disempowering tendencies and wished to challenge it. As for Echlin, I argue that she was more in
league with him as a moralist and used her alternate ending to support his argument that
imaginative thinking is sacrilegious and opposed to reason. While Bradshaigh appropriates the
language of suppositional thinking to rescue Clarissa the character from Clarissa the text, Lady
Echlin largely avoids it – ultimately enjoying a greater degree of writerly satisfaction whereas
Bradshaigh confirms Richardson's thesis on suppositional thinking's paralyzing effects by failing
to produce a standalone literary product.

Chapter Three
My third chapter concerns the professional women writers who read Richardson's novels:
his "reading writers." This chapter is structured chronologically, focusing initially on Sarah
Fielding before transitioning to Mary Hays and Jane Austen. Fielding makes for a convenient
starting point, as she was both reading critic and reading writer – a correspondent of
Richardson's, yet a published author whose works respond to his. I explore how her 1754
pamphlet Remarks on Clarissa calls attention to the ways that imaginative thinking might be co-
opted in order to guide readers toward an appropriate, Richardson-approved reading of the novel;
as a result, she both embraces and challenges his handling of imaginative thinking's potential for
mental and spiritual enrichment.
Next the reader and I visit Mary Hays, whose controversial political leanings (Godwin
was a mentor) led her to write one of the eighteenth century's most strident novels about the
travesty of female education – especially, the impact of reading habits that obstruct reason and
enflame woman's capacities for imaginative thinking. My analysis of Memoirs of Emma
Courtney primes the reader for my foray into Austen, as it lays the foundation for my chapter's

13

concern with gendered information highways. By not divulging the news of his marriage, Mr.
Harvey enflames Emma's passion and imagination, a move that continually prevents her from
thinking rationally (a plot point that supports Richardson's thesis on imaginative thinking as
obstructing reason). My reading of Pride and Prejudice examines how Austen deploys
suppositional thinking to signal when male characters provide female characters with fraudulent
social information that manipulates them into accepting alternative narratives that put them in
danger of making poor life decisions. Finally, this section of my dissertation argues that Austen
recovers imaginative thinking as a device that – if directed appropriately – helps women achieve
self-knowledge, the key to reason. Unfortunately, Austen frames women's capability of
achieving self-knowledge as ascribed by men, as they control the flow of social information in
the age of the entail.

14

Chapter One:
Suppositional Thinking in Clarissa

“My father and mother industriously avoid giving me opportunity of speaking to them alone.
They ask not for my approbation, intending, as it should seem, to suppose me into their will. And
with them I shall hope to prevail, or with nobody...” (Letter 8, pp. 61)

“At worst, will he confine me prisoner to my chamber? Will he deny me the visits of my
dearest friend, and forbid me to correspond with her? Will he take from me the Mistresly
management, which I had not faultily discharged? Will he set a servant over me, with license to
insult me? Will he, as he has not a Sister, permit his Cousins Montagu, or would either of those
ladies accept of a permission, to insult or tyrannize over me?” (Letter 40, pp. 124)

Introduction

Did Richardson invent speculative fiction? After all, his didactic novels feature long
periods of wonderment and speculation that inflect the heroine's journey along slippery and
treacherous social terrain. Distributed serially from 1747 to 1751, Clarissa, a herculean tale of
virtue and sacrifice, is a story of intrigue and conjecture; the point of his novel is to instruct, or in
the words of Carol Flynn, “to perfect” young eighteenth-century ladies, and via a scintillating
method: by cleverly deploying one of the era's most amorphous verbs: to suppose.
Richardson invokes various meanings of “to suppose” in Clarissa's hundreds of letters to
heighten the pleasure of reading and to add depth to the novel's principle themes. The first
passage above becomes more dynamic when “to suppose,” usually meaning “to imagine,” is read
according to its eighteenth-century meaning “to will into being,” thus enhancing the heroine's
mounting fear of subjugation. Passage II exemplifies a conscious narrative decision that feed
Richardson's readers' appetite for guesswork: to fill his prose with long strings of questions and
moments of wonderment couched in suppositional thinking (my term). Although the word
“suppose” does not appear in this passage, Richardson likely understood that “to suppose” had
long been a synonym for 'to infer hypothetically, thus rendering his characters' hypothetical

15

wonderments suppositional in nature.
1

Aside from 'to will into being' other definitions important to this study include, but are
not limited to, the following: “to coerce,” “to suspect of a crime or dishonorable offense,” “to
state, allege, esp. formally in an indictment” and “to forge.” Other, more peripheral meanings
include “to assume,” and “to fake a pregnancy” (OED). My research began with my discovery of
the richness of this verb, and it has unlocked for me an unprecedented reward: the discovery of a
nuanced relationship between Richardson's carefully-hewn depictions of imaginative acts and his
novel's message about the disabling effects of a suppositional, and therefore feminizing, mindset.
Clarissa's opening volume revolves around a domestic squabble: the forced betrothal of
Clarissa Harlowe to the wealthy, yet vastly unappealing, Mr. Solmes. Clarissa's rejects Mr.
Solmes, a move that her controlling family interprets as indicating a prior attachment to the rake
Mr. Lovelace, as they had maintained in a secret correspondence. Clarissa is banished to her
closet, where she spends approximately three weeks in isolation. During Clarissa's house arrest,
the novel's plot suspends. For many letters, nothing happens – Clarissa receives no entreaty from
her family, or letters from the outside world. She describes the house as “so strangely busy!”
with “Doors clapt to - Going out of one apartment, hurryingly,” yet she cannot know if these
sounds indicate that she may, at any moment, be escorted by force to Uncle Antony's for a forced
marriage. There may, after all, be “nothing in all this worthy of [her] apprehensions” (Letter
40).
2
Lacking a reliable sounding board, Clarissa engages in prolonged periods of suppositional
inquiry that appear initially to provide entertainment and a comforting, if false, sense of control –

1

The OED cites Guy de Chauliac's 1425 Grande Chirurgie as the first recorded use of 'to suppose' as 'to
infer hypothetically.'

2

She remarks that the 'certainty' of knowing what the Harlowes intend for her must be 'preferable to the
suspense.' These moments in the novel seem to prefigure the tropes of the later Gothic romance, as they
heighten our sense of fear and foreboding. The irony, however, is that the greatest danger to Clarissa's
well being lies inside her mind.

16

as if, by sheer force of thought, she could predict, envision, and therefore prevent, her social ruin.
Reason dictates that for every scenario that she can suppose, there should exist a corresponding
plan of action; however, Clarissa's suppositional thought experiments rarely produce insight.
Instead, her reliance on suppositional thinking encourages a passivity that guarantees her fall.
Richardson's aim therefore was not to praise this form of internal inquiry, but rather to establish
that things go wrong when young women tease out possible future scenarios, often in
whimsically suppositional ways, in order to make crucial life decisions.
While the first half of the novel is concerned with the negative effects of suppositional
thinking on women's decision making, Clarissa's latter half engages the dynamic gendered
relationship between suppositional thinking and Christian virtue.
3
As Clarissa gains confidence
with her rededication of mind and body to Christ, she gradually abandons suppositional thinking,
only to pass the torch to Lovelace, her tormentor. For the remainder of the novel, Lovelace
becomes the chief supposer, thus initiating a series of imaginative acts that foreshadow his
destruction and emphasize the feminizing, and thereby disempowering, effects of suppositional
thinking.
In addition to demonstrating how suppositional thinking works in the context of
Richardson's storytelling, this chapter will lay the foundation for my reading of Richardson's
correspondence with his female “writing readers”: Mary Hays, Sarah Fielding, and Jane Austen.
These writers made a study of Richardson's fiction, particularly Clarissa, and my research has
suggested that all three women engage suppositional thinking in ways that appear either to

3
Richardson thought English women were particularly marked by virtue. In 1754 Richardson writes to
Johannes Stinstra, his friend and critic, that “we in England may glory in the number of women of
genius” (Appendix, abridged Clarissa). In another letter he remarks, “Men and Women are Brothers and
Sisters: They are not of different Species” (Gwilliam, 7). Ian Watt remarks that Richardson was “always
happiest in feminine society,” and notes Richardson's admission to Miss Highmore that “nothing
improving or delightful” can be found outside the company of women (pp. 152).

17

mirror, revise or altogether challenge their interpretation of Richardson's thesis on the corrupting,
even corrosive, effects of the female imagination.
I. Suppositional Thinking & Parental Authority
Richardson's epistolary confection begins with Anna Howe's reference to “disturbances
that have happened in [Clarissa's] family” (Letter 1). Robert Lovelace, a determined suitor and
notorious rake, has dueled with Clarissa's “uncontroullable” brother, James. “An occasion so
generally known,” their clash receives widespread interest due mainly to Clarissa's
“distinguished merits” (Letter 1, pg. 39). A prolonged fever results from the “perturbation of
[James's] spirits,” though his wounds are described only as slight; Lovelace, however, is unhurt.
James's animosity toward Lovelace surges with his defeat, inspiring him to threaten harm to
Clarissa should they marry. James wastes no time in obtaining an alternative to Lovelace – the
repulsive and dull, though rich, Mr. Solmes. He is the “dreaded Solmes,” a wretch, regarded by
Clarissa “with disgust, little short of affrightment” (Letter 7, pg. 61). Boasting an air of “mannish
superiority,” he seems unaware of his many “imperfections” (Letter 8, pg. 62). Because Clarissa
refuses to submit to Solmes's entreaties, her family becomes the courted, thus initiating a motif
of proxy that sets the scene for Richardson's argument regarding sound (rational) versus unsound
(suppositional) thinking.
My introduction to this chapter notes the slippage between Richardson's covert
deployment of both conventional and unconventional meanings of to suppose including to
imagine, to coerce, to will into being, to forge, and to suspect of a crime or punishable act. The
following passage is the novel's first to situate a form of “to suppose” within the context of
coercive behavior while still engaging its meaning of indictment:
My sister came to me soon after - Sister Clary, you are going on a fine way, I understand.
But, as there are people who are supposed to harden you against your duty, I am to tell

18

you that it will be taken well if you avoid sits or visitings for a week or two, til further
order.
Can this be from those who have authority --
Ask them, ask them, child, with a twirl of her finger --I have delivered my message. Your
papa will be obeyed. (Letter 8, pp. 63; my emphasis)

If we are to believe that Clarissa's sufferings are in earnest, then we can posit that her alleged
attachment to Lovelace exists only in the minds of her family members; Clarissa's fall therefore
depends on her family's commitment to the phantoms of their collective imagination – phantoms
inspired by faulty, or at best, inconsistent intelligence. All accusations are accepted immediately
as truth, and every suspicion – based on the shiftiest of evidence – is accepted as gospel. The
behavior behind Clarissa's “going on in a fine way!” is never explained to Clarissa, or at least
never relayed in her letters to Anna Howe. In part, what we get here is a nod to the inherent
danger of reasoning that assumes that acts of thinking can supplant or forestall action, to the
hazards of the assumption that major change can be enacted at will.
In the context of Clarissa's conflict at home, the word “conviction” is often the word
assigned to her family's faith in their ability to will a more obedient Clarissa into being.
Eventually “conviction” (stalwart belief) gives way to “conviction” as formal indictment, of
being declared guilty of a crime or dishonorable offense (coincidentally, one meaning of “to
suppose”). The dual meanings of “conviction” appear to collapse, again, in Letter 52 when James
demands that Clarissa “if capable of conviction, surrender [her] whole will to the will of the
honoured pair to whom [she owes her] being” (pp. 223, my emphasis). James and Mr. Harlowe,
by the end of the letter, “have a mind to try this point with him,” as Mr. Harlowe has refused to
deliver Clarissa to Lovelace, in “supposing he has the right of a father in his child.” While the
original context for conviction leading the way to “amendment” implied conviction as a strong
belief or willingness, considering this moment in the novel through the lens of “being declared

19

guilty of a crime or dishonorable offense” opens up avenues for interpretation leading back to
one of Richardson's greatest concerns as a moralist. The Harlowes' act of convicting Clarissa of
dishonorable offenses certainly leads to amendment, but not the kind hoped for: in being
convicted (tried) for willful disobedience and of an imagined attachment to Lovelace (her
family's own willful conviction), Clarissa's conviction (willful desire) to remain single becomes
even stronger; to obtain that end, however, she must abscond with Lovelace, who promises to
help her evade marriage to Solmes. Richardson may be pointing here to the trouble with parental
authorities that abuse their power, a theme common in his works and personal letters.
Returning to the first volume's motif of proxy and displacement, Bella's power over
Clarissa suggests that her alliance with the Harlowes bestows authority by proxy; after all, being
a woman with power is only possible when parroting male voices. This parroting is clear when
Bella insists that Clarissa's “papa will be obeyed,” yet the message (“to avoid sittings”) is,
according to Arabella, hers (“my message”). This resonates with language featured in letters that
immediately surround this one: In letter 8, Clarissa tells Anna that “His courtship is to them: and
my brother pretends to court me as his proxy, truly!” (Letter 8, pp. 62) and that Solmes “Courts
them [her family] and is more and more a favorite” (pp. 61). This motif of displacement is so
profuse that it manifests even in his characters' use of passive voice. For example, Arabella
obscures the source of her orders by using the passive voice in her remark about Clarissa's
complicity being “taken well” by those individuals who fear those “who are supposed to harden
[Clarissa] against [her] duty.” On the one hand, if we read “there are people who are supposed
[assumed] to harden you against your duty” as “there are people supposed [suspected] of
hardening you against your duty” then supposed takes on a meaning that goes beyond “to
imagine” by elevating the language of the passage to that of the court (“to suspect”), thus

20

deepening its mood of indictment. “To imagine” in this context implies only an element of
careless assumption, which is far less disconcerting than the implication of a punishable offense.
But in filtering the passage through this definition of 'to suppose' we uncover one of the novel's
first indications that Clarissa's trials might be read literally like a trial: she is, after all, being
accused of violating her father's decrees. The question of whether Clarissa is tried fairly is moot:
the jury is rigged.
Clarissa's inquiry into the 'author' of Bella's message (Can this be from those who have

authority --) is cut short, suggesting the pointlessness of such an inquiry when no channels exist

through which Clarissa can appeal her charges. The twirl of [Arabella's] finger even suggests

how easily Clarissa can appeal to her father, yet she continually is deprived of the

“opportunity...of saying no to one who asks [her] not the question” (pp. 62). Finally, Mr.

Harlowe's assumption (or supposition) that Clarissa's gentleness of spirit will inspire her to

oblige him prevents his exposure to Clarissa's reasonable protestations regarding her marriage to

Mr. Solmes. Consider the following passage:

My father and mother industriously avoid giving me opportunity of speaking to them
alone. They ask not for my approbation, intending, as it should seem, to suppose me
into their will. And with them I shall hope to prevail, or with nobody ... How difficult
it is, my dear, to give a negative where both duty and inclination join to make one wish to
oblige! (Letter 7, pp. 60)

The paradox of “industriously avoid” resonates with the tension of opposing inclinations – “to

give a negative where both duty and inclination join.” On one level, this may provide another

instance of Richardson's rib-poking, in this case to highlight the absurdity of insisting that

women embody virtue and integrity while discouraging them from exercising an independent

will, which might necessitate fairness in trials of the heart. The passage also underlines strikingly

Clarissa's inability to defend herself. Clarissa's parents ensure her powerlessness in pleading her

21

case against Mr. Solmes by refusing to allow her into their chambers, an obstructionist move that

anticipates Mr. Harlowe's declaration that he will “accept no pleas” from Clarissa (Letter XLI,

end of Vol. 1).

In this same passage, note the pairing of “suppose” with the preposition “into.” To

suppose, in this context, adopts an active connotation. Gone is the more passive form of the verb

used in passages suggesting power by proxy. Here Richardson deploys its more aggressive

meaning, “to will into being.” To suppose Clarissa into their will means effectively to force her

into a complacent state of mind telepathically, by sheer force of will. This use of the verb

resonates with a later letter in which the Harlowes attempt to “reconcile [her] to [her] odious

husband by urging upon [her] the obligations [she] shall be supposed to be under from a double

duty” (Letter 35). In nearby letters we encounter numerous passages in which the Harlowes insist

upon her marriage to Solmes. Her uncle, with “hands clenched, and...teeth set,” tells Clarissa:

“yes, yes, yes...[]...you shall, you shall, you shall” and then “...a fourth time confirms it” (Letter

32, pp. 159). Today's reader might imagine a hypnotist and his subject, as hypnotists have

something in common with the Harlowes: the intent to appropriate the will of their subjects. The

word “suppose” does not appear in the confrontation described and nowhere in Clarissa's

description of her uncle's anger do we find speculation, yet “to suppose” as “to will into being”

feels omnipresent, and it resonates with the idea of the aforementioned hypnotist/subject

dynamic. Finally, by granting permission for Clarissa's unwanted marriage, and then insisting

upon it in such maniacal fashion, this passage calls up the slippage between “to suppose” and “to

forge,” for consenting to a marriage on Clarissa's behalf, and against her wishes, is to appropriate

her will by forging her consent. If Clarissa's will were a text (and it quite literally is) then the

Harlowes are violating early notions of copyright law.

22

The following passage marks the point when Clarissa accepts the inevitable: that
absconding with one man (Lovelace) is the only way to avoid another (Solmes). Of all passages
in the novel, it most clearly – and pointedly – locates the source of her predicament in her
family's “supposes:”
If I have nothing for it, as you say, but matrimony, it yields a little comfort that
his relations do not despise the fugitive, as persons of their rank and quality-pride might
be supposed to do, for having been a fugitive.
But oh my cruel, thrice cruel uncle! to suppose - but my heart checks my pen, and
will not let it proceed on an intimation so extremely shocking as that which he supposes-
Yet, if this they have been persuaded, no wonder if they are irreconcilable. This is all my
hard-hearted brother's doings! - his surmising! - (Letter 129, pp. 469)

Clarissa locates the source of her persecution in James's “surmisings,” thus positioning the works

of his imagination as her chief oppressor; these surmisings become the basis of persuasion in

volumes 1 and 2, as they persuade her parents and uncle that she intends wickedly to deceive

them. That the word “suppose” appears three times in a short passage is noteworthy: Richardson

bombards us with the word so often that we cannot overlook it. Most importantly it reminds the

reader of her family's culpability and thereby reinforces the treachery of supplanting reason with

forms of thinking that rest on hypothesis.

II. Clarissa's multiverse: Supposition as Barrier to Reason
In Clarissa's Ciphers, Terry Castle describes Clarissa's story as a 'catastrophe of reading' – she
falls victim, after all, to the “arbitrariness of signs,” to an inability to read others' intentions (57).
4

Castle goes so far as to describe Clarissa's interpretive blindness as a mental illness: “She is
caught up, one might say, in a ‘pathology of reading’” (57). While Castle's text – and many
thereafter – concern themselves with Clarissa's hermeneutic disconnect
5
, none has spotlighted

4

Zunshine reads this as “mind blindness” – see Why We Read Fiction.
5

Lovelace,
too,
suffers
from
hermeneutic
distress.
In Clarissa's Ciphers Terry Castle argues

23

the thought process that facilitates, and obstructs, interpretation: Clarissa's own suppositional
thinking. While my previous section explores supposition's role in Clarissa's conflict with her
family, this section concerns Clarissa's self-deception via this thinking habit, a habit that
proliferates once she is denied communication with the outside world.
While Clarissa acknowledges that Lovelace is unworthy of marriage, her cloistered
existence makes it difficult for her to gather the intelligence necessary to reject him entirely.
Almost all of the information she gathers about Lovelace is from Lovelace himself or transmitted
to her second – or third –hand. For example, Anna tells Clarissa that, according to a witness
present when Lovelace and James dueled, Lovelace “bound up [Harlowe's] arm, till the Surgeon
came” and later inquired into James' condition. Because neither Anna nor Clarissa were present,
Clarissa is lead to suppose whether Lovelace wasn't a merciful gentleman who “could not avoid
drawing his Sword” and that “after a slight wound given him in the arm” put it down (135).
Anna, because she only repeats information she obtained from somebody else, cannot correct
her. The trope of second-hand knowledge is common in the early novel, as it helps create the
tension that motivates readers – Richardson was almost certainly aware of this. Notably,
however, he entrenches Clarissa's speculation in the language of suppositional thinking, not in
rational discourse.
Clarissa's 'argument' begins in a lengthy letter to Anna Howe:

You say, I must have argued with myself in his favour, and in his disfavour, on a
supposition, that I might possibly be one day his. I own that I have; And thus called upon
by my dearest friend, I will set before you both parts of my argument. (pp. 127)

What Clarissa calls “argument” has only the outward appearance of such. Instead Clarissa

that ''Clarissa Harlowe is but a sign – the letter – from which, obscurely, he [Lovelace] takes
away significance. She herself receives nothing in return from this act of penetration – nothing,
that is, except grief. She remains the subject of his interpretation, without pleasure or power as
such: a hermeneutic casualty” (15).

24

produces a collection of banal observations, harrowing exclamations, and over a dozen

questions grounded in suppositional thinking:

At worst, will he confine me prisoner to my chamber? Will he deny me the visits of my
dearest friend, and forbid me to correspond with her? Will he take from me the Mistresly
management, which I had not faultily discharged? Will he set a servant over me, with
license to insult me? Will he, as he has not a Sister, permit his Cousins Montagu, or
would either of those ladies accept of a permission, to insult or tyrannize over me? – It
cannot be. – Why then, think I often, do you tempt me, O my cruel friends, to try the
difference? (Letter 40)

The word “suppose” does not appear in the passage above, yet the hypothetical nature of her

questions is a means to something similar: to imagine, the very definition of “to suppose.” In

part, these suppositional questions speak to the expansiveness of Clarissa's state of mind; they

are nearly inseparable from her struggle to express ''Not the hundredth part of what is in [her]

mind, and in [her] apprehension” (Letter 19, pp. 105). Eventually these apprehensions form a

riddle, a “pregnant puzzle” with “great meaning behind it” (Letter 75, pp. 294). If we choose to

acknowledge that an alternate definition of to suppose is to fake a pregnancy, then the text

becomes all the richer.

These prolonged periods of plot suspension frustrated many eighteenth-century readers.
Some took pleasure in the long series of letters stretching between events in the novel, yet others
accused Richardson of making it unnecessarily lengthy, and regarded these sections of the novel
as evidence of his propensity for fluff. Richardson responded to these complaints patiently, and
via a number of porticos – namely his famous postscripts and authorly intrusions. These plot
suspensions are in keeping with Richardson's conviction, included in his 1749 Advertisement for
Clarissa, that “STORY is to be principally looked upon as a Vehicle to convey the proposed
INSTRUCTION” that must necessarily be a feature of a “History of LIFE and MANNERS,” not
a mere “light Novel, or transitory Romance” (Prefaces, Postscripts, etc., pp. 76). His remarks

25

address the importance of realistically portraying a correspondence – after all, letters to friends
often are messier and less precise than letters to formal correspondents.
6
He considered fiction a
“mock encounter with experience” – ironic, considering that suppositional thinking is inherently
a “mock encounter” with the world. (Prefaces, Postscripts, etc., pg. xxvi). In February 1751
Samuel Johnson leapt to Richardson's defense, remarking in The Rambler that Richardson
teaches “the passions to read at the command of virtue.” A few months later, he would claim that
“though [Clarissa] is long, every letter is short” (The Letters of Samuel Johnson, 47-8).
Johnson's defense of Richardson is noble, though certainly we have permission to wonder if he
skipped Clarissa's most effusive letters.
One might consider that Clarissa's thought experiments could lead to a more careful
analysis of her crisis, yet this is far from the truth. To forecast possible future scenarios of
suffering and regret should reasonably coincide with greater resolve to avoid submitting to the
individual who seems to promise danger. Imagine, for a second, that Richardson were to
Clarissa's letters to reflect a 'If/Therefore' structure. 'At worst, will he confine me to my
chamber?' may transform into the lengthier, yet more productive:
At worst, will he confine me to my chamber? If so, what ought I keep on my person to
use for breaking a lock? How might the chamber appear, will there be a window through
which I may escape? Will that chamber window be as large as my own? Will that
chamber be as warm as my own, or will that chamber have madder, more menacing
villains outside its doors? Is perhaps my own chamber not a better alternative, while I
wait for my family to grow weary of their present inquisition?

Instead, Clarissa's thought processes are hobbled by a string of 'What ifs,' which crowd out the

6

In his 1748 Postscript, Richardson insists that not one letter is included without necessity. In
response to complaints about the novel's length, he cites his commitment to portraying events of
the novel as true to nature. From Richardson's point of view, any “characteristic” correspondence
between intimate friends will inevitably feature an element of “Diffuseness” (pg. 9). These
letters, as Richardson remarks in his preface to Clarissa, “are written while the Hearts of Writers
must be supposed to be wholly engaged in their subjects” (pg. 3; my emphasis).

26

‘If/Therefores’ characterizing more reasoned thought experiments. By framing her thoughts in
such a way that opposes reason, Clarissa cannot experience the revelation that Lovelace's pleas
mask a black heart – therefore worsening her plight.
7

Ultimately, suppositional thinking imposes an enormous weight. For Clarissa, to think
suppositionally leads to a disempowering cognitive passivity running counter to Locke's theory
of reason, described by Bonnie Latimer as “as a means of independent self-construction through
thinking work” (43). Rather, such cognitive passivity resonates with common eighteenth-century
attitudes that women lack reason and therefore a "stabilizing, comprehensive understanding of
oneself” leading “to articulat[ing] oneself effectively.” In other words, suppositional thinking
prevents Clarissa from "convincingly [asserting] a self-conscious, self-regulated voice amidst a
cacophony of others" (43).
8
Clarissa's suppositional thinking prevents her letter writing from
becoming the only “free self-disclosure available to women” in eighteenth-century England, yet
it supports Eagleton's claim that written acts of expression always had the potential to “surrender
them into that society's power” (26). By engaging in suppositional thinking her reason never
advances and she becomes frozen in a state of indecision that allows her tormentors more time to
plan, and carry out, their schemes. In supposing that Lovelace is a rake who may, or may not,
victimize her, Clarissa allows herself to become, to will into being via suppositional thinking, a
victim to the crimes she imagines. Thus Richardson provides a warning to his readers: too much
imaginative play assists vice, encumbers virtue, and inhibits reason.

7

Richardson's 1755 Collection Of the Moral and Instructive SENTIMENTS, MAXIMS,
CAUTIONS, AND REFLEXIONS identifies “REVELATION” as “(that greater light to rule the
moral world) that we owe the more perfect knowledge, not only of religion, in matters relative to
God, but of virtue also, in matters relative to ourselves and one another” (Preface, pp. 4).
8
See Latimer's The Manhood of the Mind for more on the common belief that as a result of
women's inability to achieve a self-regulated voice it was nearly impossible for them to write
effectively in the first-person.

27

III. Suppositional Thinking and Clarissa's Christian Imperative
Modes of thinking are bound inextricably to models of gender in Clarissa. In Clarissa
there exist several models of femininity, some of which conform to common and negative
attitudes about women with power or independence. Bella's grotesque, even cartoonish, display
of aggression suggests a quality that registers as “masculine in her air and in her spirit” (95).
Mrs. Harlow, by extreme contrast, is so passive that she never quite registers as wholly present.
It is not surprising that growing up with these extremes would trouble Clarissa's transition from
adolescence into womanhood. No positive models of womanhood exist beyond Harlowe House
either, as Mrs. Sinclair and Lovelace's harlots call up the monstrous and insatiable women of an
eighteenth-century misogynist nightmare. Even Anna Howe cannot represent a viable model;
despite her wit and independent thought, she holds no real choice in the marriage market
(Hickman is scorned, though not rejected) and her meddlesome mother continually intercepts her
letters (à la Lovelace). With no viable model of womanhood, Clarissa rejects it as a model of
being.
My project isn't suggesting that Clarissa's rejection of such models indicates a masculine
shift. Rather, Clarissa usurps gender entirely, first by erasing her physical gender as woman by
referring to her violated body as “nothing,” as merely a sub-lunar placeholder, a sexless
referent. Eagleton accepts this shift as Clarissa's “puritan repudiation of the flesh” (62). Only in

this way can she disrupt the economy that relies on the “holding, surrendering or protecting” of

her physical body. In the context of this project, Clarissa cannot become Richardson's model for

readers until she rejects womanhood entirely, everything from her physical body to the

behaviors associated with femininity – suppositional, imaginative thinking included.

Before Clarissa's suppositional thinking reaches its peak, she enters a strange period of

28

cognitive stillness initiated by the event of her absconding with Lovelace. For many letters

Clarissa's suppositional wanderings cease, with only the occasional act of wonderment

punctuating her misery. These letters adopt a more journalistic style, as they describe in precise

detail many verbal exchanges. It is worth noting that unlike other moments in the novel, Clarissa

has lost any suggestion of power over her circumstances. At Harlowe House she took comfort in

believing (however shakily) that her family may call off her engagement to Mr. Solmes. Now

that she finds herself in Lovelace's power, however, Clarissa has little agency; her one attempt to

flee Lovelace quickly fails, as he anticipates her plan for escape. What's more, had she escaped,

James' party would likely have intercepted her. Clarissa has taken the greatest gamble of her

life, and the only thing she can do is continue her correspondence with Anna. Not even this is

sacred, however, as her captor intercepts and manipulates these letters.

In this section of the novel no crossroads exist. At Harlowe House she had the power

either to yield to her family's wishes by marrying Solmes or to continue trying their patience.

She had the freedom to continue down one path, or veer into another. Being at a crossroad

implies some agency, or choice. As long as there is choice, suppositional thinking exists. Once

Clarissa arrives at Mrs. Sinclair's in London she finds herself at a crossroads yet again, and as a

result, suppositional thinking re-emerges. Now in a busy metropolis, Clarissa can remain passive

and hope for rescue, or she can take advantage of its greater population by flagging down a

stranger. Eventually Clarissa rejects passivity altogether, and while her second attempt to escape

fails, it leads her to realize a deeper bond with God. The irony, of course, is that she is handed

from one father, Mr. Harlow, to God the father, signifying a marriage despite her desperate

bid to avoid it.

Clarissa discovers that imagination has been her greatest enemy, for to become transfixed

29

by suppositional thinking is to assume power over her earthly circumstances; it is to deny a pre-

determined and God-ordained fate; in other words, Clarissa has committed sacrilege. Only by

rejecting suppositional thinking can Clarissa reconfirm her Christian faith and commit herself

wholly to God. With this revelation, Clarissa undergoes her most significant transformation.
9

Soon after arriving at Mrs. Sinclair's, Clarissa tells to Anna Howe that “inexperience

and presumption...[].. have been [her] ruin!” (Letter 173, pp. 565). Presumption is partnered

here with inexperience, underscoring the resonances between presumption, suppositional

thinking and youthful folly in Clarissa. It also echoes earlier letters in which supposition and

presumption are allied: when, in Letter 9, Clarissa reports to Anna that her father has

postponed his interview with her due to intelligence leading him “to suppose that such a gentle

spirit as mine had hitherto seemed to be should presume to dispute his will” (pp. 65). The verbs

“to presume” and “to suppose” were often used interchangeably in the eighteenth century, and

had been sharing similar meanings since the late 1500s (OED). The form of “suppose” meaning

“to lay down or assume as true; take for granted, accept without question, presuppose” appears in

Gower's “Confessio Amantis” in 1393 (OED, “to suppose”); Chaucer's “Merchant's Tale” (1395)

features a similar form of “to presume,” meaning “to assume; to take for granted; to presuppose;

to anticipate, count upon, or expect” (OED, “to presume”). In addition, the definition of “to

presume” reading “to make oneself overconfidently into an unwarranted position” resonates with

the meaning of “to suppose” denoting power through disguise: “to substitute by artifice or fraud”

(OED). The remarkable slippage between these verbs invokes a sense of misdemeanor,

suggesting that the imagination's capacity for delusions of grandeur supports a parallel between

9

This isn't to say that yielding to her parents' demands was her Christian duty – Richardson's
indictment of her parents' misuse of authority stands.

30

suppositional thinking and religious sacrilege.

Soon after arriving at Mrs. Sinclair's, Clarissa realizes that her imagination largely has

determined her fall. In her letter to Lady Betty Lawrance, she slams as “punishably

presumptuous” her earlier belief in Lovelace as “a man who had..[]..good sense enough at

bottom to be reclaimed” by a woman of virtue, i.e., Clarissa (Letter 306, pp. 985). Here Clarissa

admits to having supposed wrong, and in the sense of acting “with an assumption of authority”

(OED, “to suppose”). Clarissa charged Lovelace assuming such unwarranted authority in Letter

19, and using italics: “Two motives you must be governed by in this excess. The one my

easiness; the other your own presumption.” For Clarissa and Lovelace this passage forecasts a

deeply gendered reversal of cognitive process. After she resigns herself wholly to religion

following her rape, Clarissa stops supposing entirely.
10
Gone are her speculative encounters with

others that rely heavily on the verb to suppose. At the same time, Lovelace's suppositional

thinking increases tenfold. The result is a heightened sense of anxiety regarding his loss of

control over Clarissa that initiates a gradual process of feminization denying him reform yet not

proving him unworthy of Clarissa's forgiveness.
11

A sudden change in Clarissa's speech signals her recommitment to Christianity, as we

discover in Lovelace's post-rape account of her behavior in his letter to John Belford. At this

juncture, located near the end of her stay at Mrs. Sinclair's, he describes Clarissa's deployment

biblical pronouns. She renounces Lovelace forever, calling him the “Abhorred of [her] soul,”

10
Clarissa's recommitment to Christianity does not signal a total loss of hope for sublunary
happiness. She makes attempts several times to contact her family, hoping that her desperate
condition will renew their support.
11
In his 1751 Preface, Richardson asserts that Clarissa's primary aim is to investigate “the
highest and most important Doctrines not only of Morality, but of Christianity, by shewing them
thrown into action in the conduct of the worthy characters; while the unworthy, who set those
Doctrines at defiance, are condignly, and, as may be said, consequently, punished” (viii-ix).

31

encouraging him to “seek thy fortunes wheresoever [he] wilt, that [he] hast already ruined [her]”

(Letter 261.1, pp. 895; my emphasis). However, she does admit that she cannot blame Lovelace

entirely for her rape: “I hate thee not, base and low-souled as thou art! half so much as I hate

myself, that I saw thee not sooner in thy proper colors!” (Letter 263, pp. 901; my emphasis). Of

course, what has prevented her from perceiving the total baseness of Lovelace's character is her

suppositional thinking, figured here as form of willful blindness.

This same letter provides an interesting opportunity to witness how deploying differing

meanings of 'to suppose' can impact the reader's understanding of a character's worldview – in

this context, Lovelace's. In the passage below Lovelace describes Clarissa's gaze as turning

Heavenward as she appeals directly to God:

Great and good God of Heaven [...] give me patience to suppose myself under the weight
of those afflictions, which thou for wise and good ends, though at present impenetrable
by me, has permitted! (my emphasis)

For Clarissa, the act of supposing has become empowering, but only so long as she resigns

herself as bound for Heaven; here the reader can only “suppose” that Clarissa's resignation is

unquestionable. However, she does continue to seek channels that may reconcile her with her

family – a counterintuitive plan considering it assumes an underlying commitment to the sub-

lunar world. Clarissa's request that God grant her the patience to “suppose [herself] under the

weight” of her “afflictions” might signify gathering strength; however, if we read “suppose”

here as “to will into being” or “to engage in a fraudulent act” then Clarissa's bid for fortitude

steps into a less complimentary light. That said, to gain the patience to “suppose [herself] under

the weight” of her “afflictions” could imply that Clarissa has not wholly relinquished her will to

God, for “to suppose” (“to will”) herself “under the weight of [her] afflictions,” implies that her

commitment to God is based less on inclination and more on strategy or affectation. This is not

32

to say that Richardson intends for the reader to question Clarissa's virtue; rather, by filtering

Lovelace's account of Clarissa's behavior through the lens of one or more alternate meanings of

“to suppose,” we gain insight into how Richardson wanted his reader to interpret Lovelace's

character. For a rake, one's bid for religious salvation will always be disingenuous, which ought

to impact how Richardson's eighteenth century readers viewed the playboy's marriageability.

That Lovelace only sees duplicity in Clarissa's entreaties to God signals his irrevocable

damnation.

IV. Lovelace's reflectionings: Suppositional Thinking and Feminine Pantomime

Thirteen letters after Lovelace's report of the rape, and immediately following Clarissa's
mad papers, Lovelace begins “reflectioning,” a term he uses to describe his own suppositional
thinking. His usage increases as Clarissa's continues to discuss committing her mind and body to
God and as Lovelace enters a deeply disempowering phase symptomatic of his gradual
feminization. In Letter 268 Lovelace demonstrates his mounting concern:
That her will is not to be corrupted, that her mind is not to be debased, she has hitherto
unquestionably proved. And if she give cause for further trials, and hold fast her integrity;
what ideas will she have to dwell upon, that will be able to corrupt her morals? – What
vestigia, what remembrances, but such as will inspire abhorrence of the attempter?
What nonsense then to suppose that such a mere notional violation as she has
suffered should be able to cut asunder the strings of life? (pp. 916)

By terming Lovelace's suppositional thoughts “reflectionings,” Richardson betrays their futility:

to reflect is to ponder, from a distance, a person, event, or scenario. To reflect is not to engage

reality, to address an immediate crisis or concern; rather, reflecting implies inaction, as does

suppositional thinking in the context of Clarissa.

The concept of reflection calls forth language used in Clarissa's most desperate letters.

In Letter 78 Clarissa asks that Anna forgive the 'reflections,' that tend toward 'breaking

into [her] story.' The choice of “breaking into” recalls fragmentation, disruption, forceful

33

invasion – rape. Ironically, Clarissa interprets such reflection as therapeutic, since without it she

“should hardly be able to keep in [her] right mind, since vehemence and passion would then be

always uppermost;” if she should “think as [she writes...her] hurry of spirits is allayed” (pp. 310).

To an extent, this reads as a ringing endorsement for Richardson's project of 'writing to the

moment.' Three letters later, Clarissa cuts herself short by declaring that she “will not oppress

[Anna] with further reflections” (my emphasis) that form suppositional inquiries, yet she appears

stuck in a circle of reflectivity: instead of signing off, Clarissa declares that she must “stop” so

that she can “reflect” on her “secret pride,” a side bar preceding an onslaught of questions

grounded in suppositional thought. It seems “writing to the moment” offers its own unique and

dangerous challenges.

After leaving Harlowe House, Clarissa sees reflection as a method for transmitting her

experience to other women so they may learn from it:

When you reflect upon my unhappy situation, which is attended with so many indelicate
and even shocking circumstances, some of which my pride will not let me think of with
patience; all aggravated by the contents of my cousin's affecting letter; you will not
wonder, that the vapourishness which has laid hold of my heart, should rise to my pen.
(pp. 361; emphasis added)

Clarissa suggests that understanding results from reflection, at least for the receiver of the

reflection. If Anna were careful to consider Clarissa's “unhappy situation” then she “will not

wonder,” as if one woman's careful thinking helps the other reach greater clarity. It may also

refer to automatic writing, or taking dictation from a higher power. The question, then, is this: is

the higher authority God, or Richardson, godly authority? Regardless, this passage suggests a

covenant between women readers.

The parallel between Clarissa's reflections and Lovelace's reflectionings suggests they

share a distinctly feminine imaginative capacity, especially as Lovelace's language begins

34

mirroring Clarissa's prior to her recommitment to God. Lovelace's growing reliance on fancy, for

example, develops alongside his worsening condition and gradual loss of power. Clarissa cites

fancy, along with presumption, as one of the elements leading to her decline. Consider the

following passage:

Well but what shall be done, since the lady is so much determined on removing? – Is
there no way to oblige her, and yet to make the very act subservient to my own views? – I
fancy such a way may be found out.
I will study for it –
Suppose I suffer her to make an escape? Her heart is in it. If she affect it, the triumph she
will have over me upon it will be a counterbalance for all she has suffered. (Letter 270;
pp. 920)

Lovelace's “fancy” leads to study, implying a degree of passivity and isolation, two conditions

that governed Clarissa's experience at Harlowe House. In Letter 69 Clarissa shares a maxim from

Mrs. Norton: that there is “one time of life for imagination and fancy to work in” to be followed

by the “riper years and experience” that produce actions to satisfy a “judicious eye” (pp. 283).

Eventually Lovelace learns his lesson, though too late to redeem him. In Letter 273, while

describing his failure of his latest scheme to seduce Clarissa, he swears to “never more depend

upon those flying follies, those illusions of a fancy depraved, and run mad” (pp. 935; my

emphasis). What's more, his overuse of “fancy” invokes the frivolity of drawing room

interactions, thus implying that Richardson's condemnation of Lovelace is equally a

condemnation of the social structures that ensure his existence, a point that I develop before

chapter's end.

Located in the same volume as the dialogue about “fancy,” Lovelace's “profound reverie”

helps to accelerate his feminizing transformation from virile rascal to an ineloquent, bumbling

wreck. In Letter 271, his self-described reverie has “produced a dream” in which Clarissa goes to

bed only to find a strange man beneath her covers. This incident sends her flying to Lovelace's

35

chamber for protection, where by dream's end they engage in the “sighs, groans, exclamations,

faintings, dyings” and “vows, promises, protestations” of “lover's warfare” (pg. 922). Notice that

such “warfare” is heavily aural – rather than describing the pleasurable actions taken,

Lovelace ensures that we nearly can hear them as expressions of tension and delight. They

represent letters as, according to Eagleton, “troubled frontier[s] between private and public

worlds...[]...flushed with the desire, of the subject yet always ripe for distortion and dishonor”

(46). In addition, these passages initiate a break in genre that threatens to co-opt Richardson's

project: suddenly we are thrust into the type of pulpy romance fiction Richardson loathed – the

kind that enflamed female imaginations to the point of romanticizing rogues like Lovelace.

While ultimately Clarissa's character remains consistent with Richardson's project, Lovelace

can't get with the program: in authoring this reverie Lovelace tries to co-author Clarissa –

perhaps his greatest sin, aside from the rape.

Lovelace cannot recognize that his fall is irrevocable because he is so troubled by

supposition and its expedients. Taking this dream as a premonition, Lovelace rejoices, yet

eventually he fears that reality will intrude: he bemoans the potential for “new expedients” – the

details of which he “cannot, however, suppose” (Letter 272, pp. 924). This last remark may

suggest powerlessness when supposition is lacking – after all, he cannot reach clarity or obtain

peace because he literally is unable to imagine the nature of these “expedients.” However, his

failure to suppose them adopts new meaning if we read it not as failure to engage his

imagination, but as his failure “to forge” new meanings within the body of his texts. In other

words, Lovelace's inability to suppose bespeaks a gradual loss of agency that will lead to

cognitive breakdown inscribed by an obsessive reliance on thinking and writing, which

eventually (and ironically) drives the resurgence of suppositional thought and accompanying

36

modes of feminine speech that continue to render him irredeemable.

In Letter 275 Lovelace writes, “I say, I think, and I think; for this charming creature,

entangled as I am in my own inventions, puzzles me ten thousand times more than I her” (pp.

940). In the next letter, his puzzlement gives way to an inability to communicate. “[He] could not

speak,” he writes, for Clarissa has left him “in a state of confusion so great that [he] knew not

what to think, say or do.” Soon he admits to not knowing “for half an hour what to do with

[himself]” (Letter 277, pp. 940). Like Clarissa, Lovelace turns to writing as a balm for his

nerves. In Letter 281 he describes being unable to “sleep, nor do anything but write, if I can do

that” (pp. 945). Letter 294 finds him admitting to a Clarissian failure to do anything but write:

“But I have so used myself to write a great deal of late, that I know not how to help it” (pp. 973).

This calls to mind Lovelace's early compulsion to write (“I must write on, and cannot help it,” he

remarks in Vol. 2, pp. 498) yet in a highly accelerated form. These passages would represent the

flip-side to Eagleton's claim that Lovelace “lives on the interior of his prose, generating a

provisional reality from the folds of his text, luxuriating in multiple modes of being” (Eagleton

53). While his “provisional reality” provides numerous virtual venues or mindsets through which

he enacts his plot to master Clarissa's body and will, his act of engaging such realities only

chronicle his disconnect from the only reality that can redeem him: Clarissa's.

These passages mirror strikingly Clarissa's own use of writing to manage anxiety,

especially at the height of her reliance on suppositional thinking. In an illuminating letter to

Anna in Volume 2, Clarissa “[knows] not how to forbear writing” but that she “must write on” if

she is to “[expand her] ductile mind,” having it “under [her] own hand to improve, rather than “to

go backward” (pp. 128). In this same passage she acknowledges that “many a good thought

evaporates in thinking” and that “many a good resolution goes off, driven out of memory perhaps

37

by some other not so good.” Like they do for her protean pursuer, Lovelace, Clarissa's memories

– her reflections, as she calls them elsewhere – cause a “cognitive vertigo” that only can be

relieved by rejecting thought experiments entirely.
12
Until then, he can only foolhardily express

mourning
through imagination.
13

It is crucial to note that although Lovelace is portrayed as undeserving of redemption,

Richardson is careful not to portray him as wholly irredeemable. Richardson's treatment of

Lovelace is not entirely devoid of sympathy, as he portrays him as born a higher social

order, not of the devil's double dealings. Lovelace, at heart, represents a popular construct

born of the vision of women as slaves and men as their enslavers. Richardson ignored

Highmore's advice to make Lovelace an atheist even though his character's claims to religion

exposed troubling contradictions in his work. When pressed, he remarked that even the “vicious

characters in this History are more pure, Images more chaste, than in the most virtuous of the

Dramatic Poets” (Hints 4). Richardson often acknowledged the Rake as a problematic

figure, and in Clarissa's supplementary materials he took issue with the axiom that a rake

reformed is an ideal husband instead of a figure that destroys lives. The rake had appeared in

numerous texts as madman and sex symbol, fashionable yet unfathomably debauched, so at odds

12

Here I borrow a term from Lisa Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction. For more on this concept,
otherwise referred to as “cognitive uncertainty” see chapter 10: “Richardson's Clarissa: The
Progress of the Elated Bridegroom.”
13

To emphasize the disordering nature of the written act, Clarissa later writes that her “sentences
drag” and her “style creeps” while her “imagination” is “sunk” and her “spirits” low (Letter 40).
This passage arrives in Letter 40 of volume 2, a letter belonging to a part of the novel best
demonstrating Clarissa's reliance on suppositional thinking. That her “sentences drag” and “style
creeps” indicates a conflation of the epistle with her vulnerability to harm, as in Letter 77
Clarissa attributes the act of “creeping” to Lovelace's motives when she remarks that he “would
creep in everything where it has a view to obtain benefit by it, and insult where it had power”
(pp. 299); In another letter Anna Howe worries that Lovelace may “creep” into Clarissa's favor
by spinning his diabolical maneuvers merely as crimes of passion.

38

with Richardson's idea of paternal piety. That Richardson withheld reform from Clarissa's

Lovelace, but not from his other crooked male characters (Pamela's Mr. B is an example) seems

rooted in his male characters’ success in co-opting the language of their female counterparts to

the extent of revising their narrative to reflect their actions in a more favorable light. As Jessica

Leiman demonstrates, Pamela's Mr. B adopts Pamela's rhetorical tendencies as a part of his bid

for discursive authority, to “convert her to his way of thinking about her writing.” Put another

way, Pamela's “lexicon is the means by which Mr. B ultimately silences her,” becoming “the

generous Author of [her] happiness” (Leiman 245; Pamela 296). Mr. B “overwrites Pamela's

narrative as his own,” thus avoiding charges of the “male aggression that is so central to his

amorous pursuit” (233). To an extent, Lovelace's powerlessness recalls Mr. B's hapless and

inelegant seduction of his young maid, yet he cannot avoid charges of aggression – his rape

of Clarissa is the essence thereof. Through co-opting Pamela's narrative of distress, Mr. B is

forgiven for the violent attempts at Pamela's body (and body of work) by access to it through

marriage. Richardson denies Lovelace such absolution, for while Lovelace succeeds in co-opting

Clarissa's language of supposition, he cannot succeed in supplanting Clarissa's narrative with his

own: Clarissa's narrative has already transcended his physical, even earthly, jurisdiction. While

Pamela's experience is bodily, Clarissa's is out-of-body, thus stranding Lovelace in a speculative

limbo born of a literary culture that values indulgent and feminizing acts of supposition

over faith in a supreme God's – and author's – mandate.

V. Conclusion

Leiman figures Mr. B's “triumph” over Pamela's body of work as mirroring Richardson's

efforts to discredit the prominent female novelists – namely, Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood –

39

who used their imaginations to entertain and edify the reading public. This neatly situates

Richardson's indictment of suppositional thinking within the realm of licentious discourse:

Female conventions of storytelling, of profuse and erratic 'fancy' are as much a target of his

criticism as is Lovelace; after all, his weaknesses produce and are produced by pantomimic and

feminizing attempts to imaginatively alter his circumstances and thereby wrest narrative

authority from Richardson. Ultimately, Lovelace's reasoning abilities devolve into a parody of

Clarissa's suppositional forays, thus underscoring their disempowering nature and mirroring

Readers’ troubling tendency to trespass licentiously into the narratives of other (typically male)

authors. I suggest that Richardson considered their supposings forgeries in the purest sense,

which brings me to an examination of suppositional thinking outside of Richardson's fiction.

In 'Reading Reform in Richardson's Clarissa' Mary Patricia Martin asserts that “by
withholding reform in his novel, Richardson hopes to intensify the desire for reform in his
readers themselves, pushing it off the pages of his novel into their lives” (2). This pushing is apt,
as it calls up Richardson's reputation for pushing his texts, his vehicles for reform, into the
homes of his reader correspondents. While portraying suppositional thinking as a problematic
deployment strategy for rational thought is a project in itself, we must consider its effects on his
readers, those who responded to Clarissa in fascinating, unexpected, unprecedented ways. When
relocating our interest to suppositional thinking's effect outside the context of Clarissa, it
graduates from a literary device to one meant for convincing enterprising reading writers of
Richardson's supreme narrative authority.

40

Chapter Two
Supposing Authority:
Suppositional Thinking and Richardson's Reading Critics

Richardson had many reading critics: readers that identified as correspondents and

outspoken critics of his works. Denis Diderot, for example, admired Richardson's skill at using

his novels as vehicles for instruction: “My soul was kept in a state of perpetual education as I

read. How good I was! How just! How pleased with myself! And when I laid the book aside, I

was like a man at the end of the day spent entirely in doing good” (787). Notice that, as Diderot

praises Clarissa's edifying qualities, he describes his emotional transport without losing sight of

reading as a leisure activity; his experience is instructional yet transitory, provisional. As long as

the book was open, it worked its magic on Diderot – he maintains control of his reading

experience. When Diderot shifts his attention away from instruction and toward Richardson's

literary characters, notice that his experience of reading is characterized by less agency: “Ghosts

of [Richardson's] creation wander ceaselessly through my imagination. If I try to write, I hear

Clarissa's limits; Clarissa's shade appears before me; I see Grandison walking toward me;

Lovelace comes to disturb my mind, and the pen falls from my fingers” (787). During moments

like these Diderot loses sight of the boundary between Clarissa, the authored construction, and

Clarissa Harlowe, the character. In addition, he projects himself into the narrative, as if engaging

in a pseudo-experience with these characters. Grandison, Lovelace and Clarissa all appear before

Diderot, beckoning, encroaching upon the presumed boundary between reader and text. During

these moments, Diderot's experience begins transcending that of passive spectator in the theater

of Richardson's fiction: he is, very nearly, a member of the company himself.

Diderot's vision of Grandison, Lovelace and Clarissa is an eighteenth-century cultural

41

'sound bite' of sorts; that Clarissa is a 'shade,' while Grandison has the power to approach

Diderot, and Lovelace can actively “disturb [his] mind,” suggests that, while not necessarily

misogynistic, Diderot's reflection is born of longstanding cultural attitudes that held women as

intellectually, emotionally, and physically inferior. Eighteenth-century misogynist discourse took

many forms, and was reinforced by several influential, even beloved, male authors. Jonathan

Swift's poetry was remarkably damning, as it was inspired by the tradition of the

unapologetically misogynist Juvenal. Swift's dressing room poems (1719-1731), Gulliver's

Travel's (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729) were widely available and painted women as

stinking, slovenly ghouls born of the “inevitability and essentiality of a gendered corruption”

(Brown 427). Much rhetoric surrounding women targeted female “porousness,” an

expansiveness of body and mind causing natural licentiousness. Richard Allestree called this an

“incontinence of mind” and devotional writer Olwen Hufton determined it responsible for a

feminine lack of “self-governance” and reasoning capability that attracted “evil spirits” (Latimer

13). These attitudes influenced everything from practices surrounding marriage and inheritance

to the proprieties governing female education and the role of women in the literary marketplace.

Richardson's trouble with readers reached beyond his private correspondence. Richardson

received notes from some female readers chastising him for revealing in print the private details

of their lives; others accused him of airing their family's dirty laundry (Perry 121). It seems

likely that these responses were helped along by Richardson's insistence that Clarissa is based o

real events grounded in “nature.” Of course, Richardson's career didn't suffer from these

reactions, as such charges were just an offshoot of a greater, more profitable phenomenon:

Clarissa's ability to grant significance to female experience, having “elevated the choices that

they faced to high moral drama.” Richardson's female readers appreciated his portrayal of

42

women as “adult consciousnesses encountering the world,” as opposed to “nubile maidens

available for romance, tabulae rasae waiting for love to inscribe them” (Perry 119). Put another

way, the realism of the text offered a conduit through which readers could find meaning in their

lives beyond that of service to their fathers and husbands.

While my previous chapter focused on suppositional thinking as narrative device in

Clarissa, here I explore suppositional thinking's value outside the novel, namely in Richardson's

correspondences with outlandish society sister Dorothy Bradshaigh and her more retiring sister

Elizabeth Echlin. By co-opting Richardson's language of suppositional thinking, Bradshaigh

uses his own rhetoric against him as a device to convince him that his didactic aims could still be

met if he kept Clarissa alive. What's more, to use suppositional thinking to convince Richardson

of the injustice of Clarissa's fate would mean beating him at his own game. As for Echlin, the

absence of suppositional thinking in her lengthy alternate ending to Clarissa may confirm

Richardson's thesis on suppositional thinking as an encumbering alternative to reason.

I. A Lady and a Correspondent: Bradshaigh's Epistolary Identity

In a letter to Hester Mulso, Richardson describes the drama of his reading critics'

engagement with his literary characters:

Give me a letter of your Clementina... You know not what use I may make of such a
letter. Lady D has written me one in the character of Charlotte. Your Miss Highmore is
included to write me one in the character of Harriet... our British Minerva will honour the
character of Mrs. Shirley in another; and who knows but... she will add another in that of
Sir Charles... You will flatter yourself that my pen is at work. It is not; nor, in my
conception, ever can be, but by such inspiration (August 21st, 1754; 8).

The women referenced in this letter were far from the stage, and yet their engagement with

Richardson's novels was remarkably dramatic. That Richardson took inspiration from these

letters was incentive enough for readers to try embodying his characters in written form, as the

43

epistle provides a dynamic screen through which they could transform into the products of

Richardson's imagination; it was as if readers could inhabit his fiction if their performances as

Charlotte or Harriet or Mrs. Shirley were vivid enough. By performing as these characters

Richardson's correspondents provided social information, tips about customs and proprieties that

otherwise would remain unavailable to him by virtue of his sex. Richardson's closeness to

his female correspondents inspired scorn in future writers. WM Thackeray would refer to

Richardson as “the puny Cockney bookseller ... a moll-coddle and a milk sop,” the darling of

“old maids and dowagers.” Paraphrasing D.C. Rain, Elspeth Knights refers to Thackeray's attack

on Richardson as “vituperative, unsubstantiated but influential” (Knights 1). Over time

Richardson's detractors scorned Lady Bradshaigh perhaps most of all, as his exposure to her

“wretched misreading” of Clarissa would reduce the “imaginative daring of Clarissa to the

prevailing self-consciousness of Grandison” (Harris 130). Richardson's correspondence with a

vast cross-section of educated as well as lesser-educated correspondents likely fueled such

derision. His rather democratic approach in courting readerly support also ensured that his

correspondence varied in “age, social background, nationality ...[]...intelligence, education and

above all their relationship to him.” For some he was “an unknown author” and/or “a social

inferior, a benefactor, a mentor, an author and friend, a 'papa' or honorary father, a literary

adviser or a publisher” (Harris, paraphrasing Eaves and Kimple). He embodied these

things, and more, for Lady Bradshaigh: a correspondent that would “resist, reform, and rewrite

what aroused her” (Broder 1).

Her first letter in hand, Bradshaigh didn't know exactly how it would reach Richardson;

so she left it in Andrew Millar's shop, knowing he was a friend of the author's. Recounting the

experience, Bradshaigh writes: “I ...was frightened out of my wits, for fear of being detected in

44

the fact I there committed. A large sheet of paper lying upon the counter, I very dexterously

conveyed my parcel under it, and run [sic] out of the shop as if I had stole something out of it”

(Eaves and Kimple 221; Barbauld, IV, 177). This same hesitancy led Bradshaigh to sign her

earliest letters with “Belfour,” a pseudonym she embraced until finally revealing her identity in

February 1748 - thus ending her epistolary masquerade (Keymer 46). She made Richardson wait

a great deal longer for a visit, trying to satisfy him with a witty self-portrait: “middle-aged,

middle-sized, a degree above plump, brown as an oak wainscot, a good deal of country red in her

cheeks” (Eaves and Kimple, 227). She would tease Richardson with accounts of “a friend” –

more local to Richardson than herself - that haunted parks and squares that Richardson described

as particular favorites. Suspecting that Bradshaigh's “friend” was indeed Bradshaigh, Richardson

frequented these spaces during the specific times her “friend” found most convenient. The

prospect of meeting Richardson in person was so daunting that Bradshaigh described herself to

Richardson as “so terrified...[]... with the thoughts of it, that, at this moment, [she] tremble[d],

supposing [herself] before [him]” (Eaves and Kimple, 227). Apparently Bradshaigh's fears were

unwarranted. After seeing Richardson in person, though unbeknownst to him, she writes: “I must

own to you, that I was terribly apprehensive of finding something in your person stern and awful

- but quite the contrary. Nothing appeared but what I told Mr. Highmore I saw in your picture,

together with a mildness and good-nature, which bid me banish fear, and venture to see you”

(Eaves and Kimple, 229).

Over time Bradshaigh relaxed. In late 1749, she commissioned Joseph Highmore to paint

a portrait of Richardson for above her escritoire; this was in response to Richardson's own

request for a portrait of Bradshaigh. Each placed the portrait of the other above their escritoire in

hopes of enhancing their letter-writing experience; Bradshaigh requested that Richardson pose

45

with “a table or desk by you with pen, ink and paper; one letter just sealed, which I shall fancy is

to me” (Corr. 38). Otherwise she wished only for “a true likeness.” By June 1750 the portraits

were finished, at which point Bradshaigh hoped that looking upon Richardson's likeness “might

a little have restrained, or at least kept [her] within bounds” (Corr. 50). Ironically, Bradshaigh

“found [she] was encouraged, rather than restrained” by Richardson's smiling visage. Bradshaigh

was free to bluster on “without fear or wit” as if Richardson's bewitching gaze had blessed her

act of writing.

Bradshaigh's blissful account of the portrait's effect on her writing contrasts sharply with

earlier anxieties about meeting Richardson in the flesh; Bradshaigh was adamantly against

accepting Richardson's early invitations for tea, as she feared that his presence would “silence

her,” that he would “[reign] in her power of speech” – as if, through revealing her body and

encountering his own, Bradshaigh would become censored by the social mores that silenced

women generally, as well as their bodies of work. Shortly before Bradshaigh agreed to meeting

Richardson in person she addressed these “causeless fears and apprehensions”: “But had I not

cause, from my own behavior? Conscious of having said things that I could not with reason

expect you to bear with common patience, how was it possible, but I must dread an interview?”

(Corresp. 8). She describes not “fear,” but something unnamable which “reigns in [her]

freedom of speech” (my emphasis).

Lady Bradshaigh played the supplicant when it suited her – and, to an extent, she really
was in awe of Richardson. Her letters often were buffeted by long-winded exclamations
regarding Richardson's willingness to entertain a correspondence. Often she admonished herself
“for taking up so much of [Richardson's] time” and would sign her letters as his “obliged and
faithful humble servant” (Corr. 9; 48). Later she would respond to his request for advice on

46

Clarissa by remarking that it caused her to “blush most immoderately'...[]... for [she] must be
mistress of a consummate assurance, in offering to put words in the mouth of the ingenious Mr.
Richardson without a blush of the deepest dye” (Corr.180-18). Bradshaigh's attitude was
compatible with Richardson's tendency to speak to his female correspondents as an instructor
would speak to a student and treat his works in progress like didactic texts.
Richardson and Bradshaigh's teacher-student dynamic found its medium in Clarissa's
margins. The margins of Clarissa's Letter 21 (in Vol 1) provide an especially illuminating
example of Richardson's teacherly nudgings. In this letter, Clarissa describes finding “[her]
mamma and sister together in [her] sister's parlour;” In response Bradshaigh scribbles (for
Richardson's eyes): “Every one a parlour, what an uncommon & unnecessary thing” (Barchas
48). Richardson would review Bradshaigh's edits and marginal comments, and would reply in
kind, returning the volume for another round of feedback. His response to Bradshaigh's remark
about the individual drawing rooms reads: “Looks like,” thus inviting Bradshaigh to consider the
symbolism. Taking his cue, in her signature cramped scrawl, she writes: “a devided family.”
This editorial exchange indicates that Richardson viewed Bradshaigh as intelligent enough to
interpret the symbolic codes driving his fiction – in fact, their interplay as Editor and co-Editor
provides enough material for scholars to suggest that Richardson's confidence in female
capacities for analysis was ahead of his time.
In their letters, Richardson and Bradshaigh tend to treat each other like characters

ensconced in a shared piece of fiction, appearing and re-appearing in each other's lives

sometimes with invitation but always with purpose. In January 1751, following some letters in

which Bradshaigh describes the many aspects of her daily routine at Haight, Richardson delights

in knowing “at what different parts of the day to obtrude [himself]” (Corr. 61). Having been left

47

to entertain himself by his family, Richardson envisions breakfasting with Bradshaigh and her

husband; the vision had been so life-like that, having “recovered himself,” he discovered his “re-

transport” to have been a sorrowful one, having realized again that “the [portrait] before [him]

was but a picture.” In summer he plans to “throw myself into your morning walks and

sometimes perhaps you shall find me pushed upon one of your pieces of ruins, symbolically to

make the ruin more complete” (Ibid). Richardson plans to interject himself into her life, and her

life story, as both symbol and referent.

As Lady Bradshaigh's correspondence with Richardson continued, she found her voice.
She “disclaims,” even demands that Richardson recant his glib remarks on the “female love of
surprise and puzzle,” as they had justified his sharing Bradshaigh's private remark on Mrs.
Richardson's “stern” countenance, as if the difference between how Mrs. Richardson views
herself and how others view her would cause amusement (Corr.). And while her letters were still
punctuated by the occasional nod to Richardson's genius, she gained enough confidence to begin
what later became a concerted effort to challenge Richardson's narrative authority. In a letter
dated November 10th, 1748, Bradshaigh requested that Richardson not send her Clarissa's final
volumes, as she feared an unhappy ending: “will you not take it amiss, Sir, if I beg you will not
send the remainder of your volumes? Pray think me unworthy of such a favor, though I should be
sorry to know you thought so. I cannot promise to read them, but will endeavor” (Bradshaigh IV,
pp. 22). Richardson sent the volumes anyway, at which point Bradshaigh relented, remarked that
“it [was] purely out of gratitude, and to oblige [Richardson]” (ibid). Bradshaigh's resistance
wasn't callousness, however; for her it 'does not involve a retreat from empathy, it means altering
the text (Knights 234) – and attempt to alter it, she did.
Bradshaigh felt it was her duty to advocate for Lovelace's reformation and therefore

48

Clarissa's survival, if not their marriage. By the time she initiated this correspondence, Clarissa

the character had transcended literary construction for Bradshaigh, for her responses to this novel

border on hysteria, even religious rapture. In the following passage, Bradshaigh upbraids

Richardson for even entertaining the idea of denying readers of Clarissa a happy ending:

If you disappoint me, attend to my curse: - May the hatred of all the young,
beautiful, and virtuous, forever be your portion! and may your eyes never behold any
thing but age and deformity! may you meet with applause only from envious old maids,
surly bachelors, and tyrannical parents! may you be doomed to the company of such and,
after death, may their ugly souls haunt you! (Corr. 401)

One might expect this response from some pimpled, tyrannical crone, hovering menacingly
above a sleeping infant; alas, the passage only represents the torrid responses of an excessively
imaginative reader. Other examples abound: Waiting for Volume 5 of Clarissa, Bradshaigh
describes herself as vacillating between “a faint glimmer of hope and complete despair, emotions
that gave way to a desire to die, for I can neither eat or sleep till I am disburdened of my load”
(Corr. IV, 183). Bradshaigh's rhetoric echoes Clarissa's own as she awaits her fate at the hands of
Lovelace; this time, however, the machinations of Mr. Richardson, not Mr. Lovelace, cause
Bradshaigh's mingling excitement and dread. Upon finishing the novel, Bradshaigh's reaction is
visceral: "My spirits are strangely seized; my sleep is disturbed; waking in the night, I burst into
a passion of crying; so I did at breakfast this morning, and just now again” (Corr. IV, 242).
William Beatty Warner interprets Bradshaigh's hyperbole as a performative “reading
experiment” that “imitates Clarissa's passion.” Her “initial anxiety is like Clarissa's fearful wait
the night of the rape,” enhancing “the authority of her sufferings through explicit comparison
with the ways Belford and Lovelace mourn the death of Clarissa” (Warner 163). Perhaps it was
through supposing herself as Clarissa that Bradshaigh devised a rhetorical strategy grounded in
suppositional thinking.

49

Ultimately, Richardson's and Bradshaigh letters reveal two opposing, and deeply

gendered, forms of epistolary discourse: Richardson's authorly teachings and Bradshaigh's

resistance, both of which are grounded in suppositional thinking. While the former reflects the

way a teacher would appeal to a stubborn or shortsighted pupil (he regrets, at one point, that “it

was supposed that I had no other End in...so large a piece...but the trite one of perfecting a

private happiness, by the Reformation of a Libertine” (Eaves and Kimple 223). Bradshaigh's

approach adopts a Clarissian presentational style, as if tempting Richardson to sit back, relax,

and imagine a promising alternative. Because Richardson shared Bradshaigh's experience of

Clarissa as nearly real (he writes, “Poor Cl! how much I pity thee! whenever I think of thy

Character as a real one!”) her methods make a degree of sense (Barchas 66).

Bradshaigh's approach developed slowly over time, perhaps in response to Richardson's

teacherly suppositions that use logic to correct what he saw as Bradshaigh's errors in

interpretation. In Bradshaigh's earliest correspondence with Richardson, she would preface her

opinions on the works prescribed her with a suppositional bumper, as if to cushion the impact of

a woman's engagement with textual criticism. Responding to Hervey's Meditations Bradshaigh

writes: “The parting of a happy couple I cannot stand, in whatever shape it appears. I suppose

this work is reckoned a well-wrote piece; and yet the style does not please me in many places.

Do you think it quite easy, Sir?” (Corr. 7). Eventually, Bradshaigh would adjust her usage

of suppositional thinking in her epistles to mirror Clarissa's deployment of suppositional thinking

in her letters to Anne Howe and others. Though Richardson's pen technically guides Clarissa's,

his references to supposition in his didactically-bent letters to Bradshaigh are less performative

(supposing this, versus that) and more focused on opposing supposition entirely. Consider the

following excerpt from June 2nd, 1753:

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But, after all, asks your ladyship, is it not, a tyrannical, a pitiful bravery, in a man, to
expect a poor Woman (how pitifully you speak of your sex!) to yield, only that a man
may shew the power of prerogative, and gratify his pride, by joining an obligation to his
conquest? Equally pitiful and tyrannical where this is the case. But why need this be
supposed to be the case? If men as your Ladyship allows, leave superior understanding to
women, why need the pride of prerogative be supposed to be his inducement to wish him
inferior in sense to give up her will to his; especially, when she had not been his, it's not
about, at the altar, obedience to him? (my emphasis)

Richardson's request that Bradshaigh see past her own “supposes” (assumptions) implies that

suppositional thinking underlies faulty reasoning; accordingly, Richardson seeks to adjust

Bradshaigh's frame of mind, to coach her in the direction of a new set of observations, to realize

the flaws in her claim that men assume they can manipulate women into consent while

considering them to possess a more superior understanding. Bradshaigh does often concede

Richardson's points about gender, power, and class but when her beloved Clarissa's fate hangs in

the balance, she is far less open to correction.

Bradshaigh's proposed ending eliminated the rape and kept Clarissa alive, specifically to

prove that she would never have been convinced to marry Lovelace. According to Bradshaigh,

Clarissa “shou'd in time have recovered her health, and have liv'd to her hearts content, a private

life, in the neighborhood of her dear Miss Howe, and to the edification of all around her.”

Bradshaigh also reunited Clarissa with her family, particularly her mother, Mrs. Harlowe, and

maintained a “distant friendship with Lovelace, to his soul I mean, for in the condition I will

suppose him, he never cou'd think of persecuting his adored Clarissa with farther address.”

In this version Clarissa lives out the remainder of her years in peace, setting an example for the

many children that she mentors. Bradshaigh viewed this ending as the more progressive one,

and acknowledged how different it was from her initial vision for Clarissa – marriage

to Lovelace reformed (Broder 110).

As Bradshaigh becomes more desperate to appeal to Richardson, her letters adopt

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Clarissa's style of suppositional rhetoric, not Richardson's, perhaps to underline her allegiance to

Clarissa the autonomous character, not the inseparable product of Richardson's imagination.

Consider the following:

Suppose Clarissa, after having been brought to the verge of the grave by the ill treatment
she has received; suppose she should, by using proper means, assisted by her own divine
reflections, and a consciousness of her innocence, so far compose her mind, that she is in
a great measure restored to her former state of health, but still steady in her refusal of
Lovelace; upon which, he, being overwhelmed with grief, remorse, and self
condemnation, is thrown into a dangerous fever, or any other illness, so as to make his
life despaired of. At the desire of a dying man, the good Dr. Lewen intreats and prevails
with compassionate Clarissa to make him a visit, as a charitable act. (What an interesting
scene might you there introduce!) He endeavours to excite her pity and forgiveness. She
promises him her prayers, and a second visit; when we will suppose him given over
his physicians, and in all appearance very near his end; and, after receiving the
communion together, as a token of their perfect charity to each other, would the
following request be inconsistent with his present circumstances? (Corr. 205)
14

Instead of a play-by-play synopsis of an optional ending to Clarissa, Lady Bradshaigh describes

colorfully, via suppositional thinking, possible alternatives; in turn, she encourages Richardson

not only to consider, but to pseudo-experience her alternative plot. Bradshaigh's supposes appear

even hypnotic, as if to convince Richardson of her story's viability via some early understanding

of power of suggestion. After all, if we read “to suppose” as “to will into being” then engaging in

suppositional thinking with Richardson was Bradshaigh's method of getting her way – by sheer

force of will.

Perhaps Richardson was not insensible to Bradshaigh's craftiness. A quick glimpse at
Richardson's correspondence with Lady Bradshaigh suggests that Richardson was aware of his
correspondent's use of supposition as coersion. In a letter from XYZ Richardson writes: “You
suppose me, Madame, to be one who can believe that there is felicity in marriage” (my

14

Bradshaigh locates the nexus of Clarissa's recovery in her mind, suggesting that its
“composure” has reinstated 'her former state of health.'

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emphasis). In this context suppose appears to mean assume; Bradshaigh has inferred from a
previous letter that Richardson believes a happy marriage is possible (and therefore, argues
Bradshaigh, not an unreasonable request for Clarissa and Lovelace) even thought Richardson had
not explicitly said so. Although Bradshaigh was correct in reading Richardson as a believer in
happy marriages, note that Richardson's use of suppose me situates him as the passive object of a
supposition, thus indicating a correlation between supposition and coersion. In fact, notice the
absence of the coordinating conjunction: his usage is “suppose me” rather than “suppose that I.”
This coordinating conjunction is missing throughout Richardson's letters to Bradshaigh as well
as others and appears again when (in referring to his reasons for writing a religious novel)
Richardson tells Bradshaigh that “Religion was never at so low an ebb as at present. And if my
work must be supposed of the novel kind, I was willing to try if a religious novel would do
good.”
15
Of course, languages develop over time, so it only makes sense that the English of
eighteenth-century England would differ from contemporary English on numerous syntactic and
morphological levels. It's more than likely that over three centuries “Suppose me” has simply
morphed into “suppose that,” “suppose that you”, “suppose that I”, etc. But I want to point out
that the eighteenth-century construction of supposition is allied more closely with action,
arriving in an imperative verb form. Also, notice the tone. That Richardson's work “must be
supposed of the novel kind” is suggestive of a confluence of power that derives not from within
but from without – a confluence that does not necessarily imply Richardson's lack of authority
but rather belies his resentment of the public's dismissive attitude toward receiving moral
guidance (that religious “ebb”).

15

Correspondence,
pg.
187

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Some critics appreciate Bradshaigh's dynamic method of carving a niche for herself in
literary history while still leaving in tact her conservative values. Knights remarks that for
“however much her style might have flouted traditional roles, [she] still returned to them” (235).
She curtsied, but with lifted chin. That is, Bradshaigh never fully relinquished her self-assigned
position as reading critic, despite Richardson's strictest admonishments. Her first-edition
volumes of Clarissa feature “Do:Bradshaigh” on the flyleaf above Richardson's 'From the
author.' And, despite his rebukes, Bradshaigh remained Richardson's reading critic for the
remainder of his life and provided a crucial sounding board for Richardson as he began
envisioning the world of Sir Charles Grandison.
In the late 1750s, Phillip Reich approached Richardson about publishing “a Vol:e or two
of select letters” from his correspondence with Bradshaigh. Gathering a mass of letters was no
obstacle, as Richardson for years had cataloged their correspondence by saving her letters along
with copies of his responses. However, their complete correspondence is impossible to obtain
even today, as both Richardson and Bradshaigh “rewrote and obliterated substantial parts of their
letters” (Carrol 336). Some critics interpret Richardson's archive as evidence of his outlook on
letter writing; these letters likely were devices to help Richardson “fashion himself as an author
and promote his fiction through a network of readers and commentators” (Curran 51). His
attempt to see their publication within his lifetime failed and history would prove that such a task
was fated for Anne Leticia Barbauld, whose 1804 edition of Richardson's correspondence with
Bradshaigh is still used by scholars. How fitting it was that, ultimately, it was a lady that edited
Richardson's most private works.
Of course, we know that Richardson never accepted Lady Bradshaigh's alternate ending
as viable, rendering largely ineffective her use of suppositional thinking as a persuasive device

54

against Richardson. She would remain his literary 'wing woman', an Anna Howe of sorts:
It would be difficult in me to deny myself the hope of such a correspondent to the end of
my life. I love Miss Howe next to Clarissa; and I see very evidently in your letter that you
are the twin-sister of that lady. And indeed I adore your spirit and earnestness. (Corr. 94)

This letter must have been flattering, for to achieve status as the “twin-sister” of a beloved

character was quite an accomplishment. What's more, by ‘casting' Bradshaigh as Anna Howe,

the support to Clarissa's lead, Richardson appeals to Bradshaigh's desire to become a part

of Richardson's imagined world and a conspirator in his writing process. At the same time,

however, he nudges Bradshaigh just out of the spotlight, clearing room there for himself as the

lead player. What's more, by using suppositional thinking to change Richardson's mind about the

fate of his Clarissa, she may unknowingly have committed self-sabotage, relegating herself as a

minor character in literary history; from Richardson's point of view, Bradshaigh may have

exemplified the folly of allowing one's imagination to triumph over reason. By allowing her

emotions to distort her reading of the text, she, like Clarissa, adopts suppositional thinking and

falls victim to its paralyzing side effects. In Bradshaigh's case, this lack of agency is realized in

Bradshaigh's alternative ending never transcending the proposal stage and achieving a textual

'body' of its own.

II. “a woman without taste!”: or, Richardson's Reluctant Expansionist

Lady Elizabeth Echlin had her sister pegged: as a character as much as a collaborator,

initially masquerading in her correspondence with Richardson as “Belfour” and later as his

characters in faux letters. On August 12th, 1754 Echlin requests that Richardson

ask Lady B – if she sees a similarity between Charlotte Grandison and a comical lady,
who was formerly called Miss Do. I discovered a strong resemblance in their lively wit
and humour. This merry girl (Miss Do) was my intimate acquaintance in the days of
yore; and my Lady ever was, and is, her inseparable companion. You may wonder,
perhaps, if I add, she still continues so strongly attached to this Do, that she loves her

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rather better than her dear good Sir Roger. (August 12th, 1754; Barbauld 15).

At first glance this represents one of many references to Bradshaigh as a shape-shifter, as Protean

tease. However, a crucial difference remains: here Echlin does not equate Bradshaigh with

Charlotte Grandison – instead, Echlin invokes a curious placeholder, a persona, a “Miss Do.”

The name alone suggests perpetual youth; this “Miss Do,” this “merry girl,” remains eternally

single, flighty, free. Miss Do isn't another iteration of Lady Bradshaigh, another thread in the

fabric of her psyche; rather, Miss Do is separate, individual. Their connection is fierce, as Echlin

implies that Bradshaigh “loves [Miss Do] rather better” than her husband, Sir Roger, implicating

Bradshaigh in a Sapphic affair with her art. Richardson entreats Echlin to join forces with him

“against this Miss Do:”

There is not a better lady on earth than your sister, when Miss Do is out of the way.
Strange! that so excellent a lady as Lady B– (your Ladyship's sister) should be so misled
by such a flirt as Miss Do.' (Oct 10th, 1754; Corr. 36)

The language of illicitness continues, with Bradshaigh “so mislead” by that “flirt” Miss Do. She

is her “companion in her closet or dressing-room” where Bradshaigh “now-and-then writes a

paragraph for her there” (Oct. 10th, 1754). Richardson's description of Bradshaigh's

collaboration with Miss Do is a beautiful metaphor for the covert business of women's writing,

which, for want of public approval, was relegated to the private domestic sphere; however,

Richardson only reinforces the cultural attitudes that kept women writing under the 'cover' of

their closets and dressing rooms by describing Bradshaigh as being “so misled” by that “flirt”

Miss Do. From Richardson's perspective Bradshaigh's writing is queer act, unsanctioned, and

from Echlin's purview somehow in violation of her marriage to Roger; her writing is, in every

sense, a private affair.

Echlin was equally as concerned as Bradshaigh with revising Richardson's Clarissa story,

56

yet their approaches contrast significantly; instead of relying so heavily on deploying

suppositional thinking in her letters, Echlin plays more discreetly into Richardson's concern

about sacrilegious forms of imaginative thinking by making it a chief theme in her Alternative

Ending to Richardson's Clarissa.
16
Evidence suggests that Echlin, like Richardson, was

concerned with the disconnect between imaginative thinking and Christian virtue. Our first

indication of Echlin and Richardson's shared concern occurs when William, Lovelace's

uneducated and lower class servant, joins a conversation between Lovelace and Belford

concerning virtue, he calls himself a “simplish clown of a Lad” who “cou'd read a bit, a printing”

and “ust to spell ‘ith Bible book, at home with [his[ mother.” Despite his early exposure to

Christian doctrine, he took Lovelace's wicked example to heart, assuming there is “no harm done

if a Body don't heed it, nor mind going to church neither, I may very well suppose – for your

honor n'er minded such sort of matters; and so, I thought to my self – what need I trouble my

head about prayer and all that” (768; my emphasis).William's flippant remark casts suppositional

thinking in the light of ignorance; it also sends a troubling message that virtue lies as much in

example as it does in learning. Lovelace tells William that [his] ignorance makes [him]

excusable” and that “whatever wrong things you may have done is my fault – not yours.”

William's past behavior is the product of “a very wicked master” (769). Of course, Echlin

echoes Richardson's conviction that individuals require seeing virtue performed – a sly plug for

the benefits of instructive reading, as one may encounter numerous ‘actors’ performing

virtuously in religiously-minded texts. Echlin's emphasis that only rational thinking, as opposed

to imaginative (suppositional) thinking, is compatible with a Christian mandate, leads her to

claim for herself status as Richardson's reading critic and (though hard won) status as reading

16

Yes, Echlin was an expansionist, but not to the extent of circulating her own work to larger
audiences or significantly revising Richardson's plot.

57

writer.

III. Lady Echlin’s Villarusa

Richardson's correspondence with Echlin began in 1753. At the time, Echlin was living in

Rush, Ireland, with her husband Robert Echlin, a member of Jonathan Swift's social circle.

Echlin initiated her correspondence by writing to offer Richardson support in the high profile

dispute with George Faulkner, the popular Irish publisher whom Richardson had accused of

conspiring with Irish publishing pirates to extort money for Irish publishing rights (check

validity; Coyle 111). Richardson had considered reaching out to Echlin for comments on early

drafts of Sir Charles Grandison but delayed because “the kindly-intended, but naughty

interposition of dear Lady B. [had] discouraged [him] from such an application” (30 Jan. 1754;

Eaves and Kimple 447). Richardson's remark initiated a pattern in their correspondence of

teasing Lady Bradshaigh, and Lady Bradshaigh played along gleefully (Eaves and Kimple

447). Bradshaigh “threatened” Richardson against the correspondence and he “[took] the liberty

to threaten her” in return; paraphrasing Bradshaigh, Richardson tells Echlin that she “knows how

to set us together by the Ears” and that he “boldly returned her menaces” (12 Sept. 1754; Eaves

and Kimple, 448).

More reclusive than her socialite sister, Echlin avoided the bustling social arenas of mid-

eighteenth century England. And yet, perhaps due to her lively epistolary style, she earned a spot

in Richardson's virtual drawing room. Like Lady B., she was unafraid of gilding her letters with

gentle ribbing : “Give me leave to say, you have more good nature, humility, and patience,

than any other man upon earth, or you certainly are the greatest hypocrite under the sun”

(September 27th, 1754; Corr. 29). She remarks that others in Rush had considered her “a

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strange, old-fashioned, hum drum” creature favoring solitude over social engagements (Eaves

and Kimple 448; 2 Sept. 1755). She described herself as the “most unfashionable plain country

body you can imagine – uncouth at least” (23 Aug. 1760; Eaves and Kimple 450). Accordingly,

Echlin cautioned Richardson against assuming her “a modish fine lady”; rather, she is “the oldest

woman of [her] years.” “So uncouth in my manners, and morals, shall I say, that many people

older than myself, think me intolerably stupid, or at least, a woman without taste!” She adds,

with a ring of satire: “I almost despise myself and all mankind” (Feb. 23rd, 1754; Barbauld 2).

Charmed by this self-portrait, Richardson remarks: “your Ladyship to be such a phoenix in the

midst of such dissipation! - How I admire you! - Not understand whist! - not play any one game

of cards, and avoid routs, drums; - wedded to your own apartment, and seldom engaged broad!”

With tongue planted firmly in cheek, he adds: “No wonder that many ladies older than yourself

think you tasteless. But how much must you, Madam, despise these gadflies of a summer's day!

or, rather, of a winter's day; for their summer is probably passed” (March 19th; Barbauld 8-9).

Echlin's self-portrait as a retiring, “hum-drum” biddy likely sat better with Richardson

than Bradshaigh's fiercely-rendered persona, as it was less threatening to his authority as author

and therefore positioning her as a budding reading writer, not merely a volatile, if entertaining,

reading critic. Of course, as years passed, Bradshaigh hit a more reasoned stride, earning

Richardson's respect as a consultant on manners and plots; however, her letters never quite

reflect the praise enjoyed by Echlin as a critic and standalone writer, though such praise was

never bereft of own Richardson's subtle reminder that he was the sanctioned writer, and she,

forever the apprentice.

Little scholarship acknowledges the distinctly literary qualities of Lady Echlin's

correspondence, particularly those letters that showcase her remarkable talent for writing

59

gracefully about nature. By the mid-1750s, Echlin's letters read like travel pieces inspired by

Immanuel Kant's Observations On the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, though it was not

due for another decade. Her letters in the mid-1750s feature descriptions of the seaside “rock-

savage hive, grot, or hermitage” built by her husband, Robert:

From this house we have an open-sea prospect, and I think this ever ebbing, or flowing
piece of water, a delightful entertainment. On a delicate, fine, smooth sand, is my favorite
ramble; close at the side of this herring-pond, I talk, well amused with artless variety; and
in this pleasant bay, commodiously bounded with rocks, I bathe. (Sept. 2nd, 1755;
Corr. 57).

One easily can envision Lady Echlin as the Venus de Milo, as her vitality captures expression in

the verby prose: rather than passively observing nature, Echlin “ramble[s]” and “talk[s],” well

amused with artless variety.” The scene is an “open-sea prospect” yet she describes being

“commodiously bounded,” a fine poetic riff on the inherent contradictions of mankind's

rendezvous with nature. Echlin’s musings astounded Richardson, though he embeds his praise

with remarks aimed at undercutting subtly any claims Echlin potentially could make for the

artistic, authorly merits of her prose:

You delight me, Madam, by your charming description of your Villarusa. It is the more
delightful, as you seem not to know how charmingly you have described it. What a
beautiful situation must that be, that, simply to mention it as it is, will strike one's
imagination so much to its advantage (Sept 22nd, 1755; 61)

At first, Richardson describes Echlin's account as “charming,” “delightful.” However, that her

description is more beautiful because “[she] seem[s] not to know how charmingly” she writes

dampens the mood by denying how artfully Echlin renders her description. Of course, this could

be read as a playful moment, or perhaps Richardson wants to avoid embarrassing Echlin with

excessive praise; however, when read alongside Richardson's next remark, a pattern emerges:

Richardson reads Echlin's richly metaphoric text as stark realism (she “simply...mention[s] it as

it is”) thus choosing to diminish the merits of her work as deliberate art.

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Passages from later epistles suggest that Richardson's responses to her earlier Villarusa

letters to some extent influenced her later ones; to some extent Echlin appears to take

Richardson's lead, as by 1756 she appears to have adopted Richardson's language in recent

descriptions of the Villarusa. She now calls it a “private place ...[]...chosen, and the whole thing

contrived, by an admirer of plain nature, and a lover of solitude” (Feb 7th, 1756; 69, my

emphasis). Her previous engagement with nature was more social (she would “talk” during her

ambles along the herring pond); it was as if instead of being an alternative to the social scene her

engagement with nature was simply an alternative kind of social scene; she was one with nature,

a vital part of the scene itself. Now, she is “a lover of solitude” and gone are the pleasing

references to communing, and communicating, directly with nature. She muses that “[u]nder a

high rock, in the midst of a wild rocky fence, stands my humble cell, which for shape and size

may be called a bee-hive; it is a pleasant retirement, in a very romantic situation” (68-69). The

word “cell” invokes confinement, as does a bee-hive, where legions of ants toil to preserve their

Queen. It's “a delightful rural scene” where there “is nothing more elegant, nor less beautiful;”

the scene is “so naturally pleasing, it less wants artificial decoration.” She asks for Richardson's

blessing in crystallizing the scene: “if you would allow of the expression, is it rudely elegant.”

Here Echlin keeps Richardson as an authority over her own text.

In a Villarusa letter from the following year, her point of view is even more detached,

aligned with that of a passive spectator. She spends her time

collecting curious rocks, representing animals, and sea-monsters with which that shore
abounds; and with those unhewed carvings I ornamented my ragged, hanging shelves. I
have no shell-work, only what nature affords, growing on my rocks, which appears more
beautiful in my eye, than the formal delicacy of laboured art. I admire shells in their
native dress, and I have a choice collection. (Feb. 7th, 1756; 69)

Echlin's diction contrasts sharply with her previous language of soft sands and flowing water,

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now calling up harsher images of crude scarcity; instead of the Venus or a luxuriating nymph,

her persona is that of a hermit, decorating her “ragged, hanging shelves” with “only what nature

affords.” Her decorations are “unhewed carvings,” again emphasizing a lack of creative vision.

In fact, this passage would appear to reject any effort to transform the scene through imaginative

engagement with it. However, notice that the art form before her (the Villarusa) rejects the

“delicacy of laboured art,” making it more beautiful in Echlin's “eye.” This reference to

perspective in art (the artist's objective “eye”) marks a notable turning point in this passage, for it

undermines the critic's role by invoking objectivity. Her Villarusa, no matter how she represents

it through writing, remains immune to the subjective critical impressions that tend to sanction or

delegitimize other writers. What's more, this passage portrays the Villarusa as a writer's

archive, a place for her to display her writerly wares: the symbols that invoke meaning (“curious

rocks, representing animals, and sea-monsters”); the ideas that modify meaning (“those unhewed

carvings” that decorate her “ragged, hanging shelves”; and the words that embellish meaning

(“shells, in their native dress” of which she has “a choice collection”). As proprietor, Echlin

implies control over creative endeavors representing her hermitage, that “wonderful recreation”

that “serves to unbend [her] mind” (83).

In December 1757 Richardson rhapsodizes about what he “would...[]...give for a sketch

of [Echlin's] sweet hermitage, and of the wonders round it; and in prospect from it” (Dec. 3rd,

1757; 86-87). He asks Echlin for permission to commission an artist for a sketch of the Villarusa

to hang beside Highmore's painting of Lady Bradshaigh and Sir Roger. Perhaps Richardson

considered this a strategy for overriding Echlin's act of writing via the commission of another art

form entirely, confining within the limits of a static art form her fluid capacities for

representation. At any rate, Echlin graciously discouraged the commission Highmore, offering

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instead to commission a “young artist, a fair lady,” keeping on her side creative control of the

likeness. In response to Richardson's intent to hang the sketch alongside the portrait of Lady

Bradshaigh at Haigh, she writes:

But this piece of plain nature, is by no means fit to be placed near that palatium mansion
house, Haigh. I wish to see it fixed in your pleasant, rural retreat. Indeed, Sir, I do hope to
place it with my own hands, at Parson's Green – if I live to reach the south of England, I
trust we shall meet. (Corr. 90)

Under the guise of humility, Echlin continues to assert control of this adaptation of her artistic

rendering. She intends to deliver the sketch personally, cutting out the middle man, as if by

sending the painting via messenger she loses a degree of authority. She suggest another location

for its hanging, refusing even to leave this choice to Richardson. She hopes to “see it fixed,” to

“place it with [her] own hands, at Parson's Green.” Going so far as to leverage its delivery

against her health (she was always ailing, it seemed) Echlin almost ensures that her Villarusa –

and any representation of it – remains locked in her writerly grip.

IV: Echlin's Alternate Ending to Clarissa

Echlin's Christian mindset lent her credibility with Richardson as an expansionist of

Clarissa. Echlin had always been more conservative than Bradshaigh, and over time she

exchanged with Richardson a series of religious texts. In Winter 1775 Richardson sent Echlin, a

fan of Skelton, a copy of his “instructive discourses.” She writes: “I have only perused a small

part, of this divine piece, and am greatly delighted with what I have read...[]...I thank you, Sir,

for introducing another wise charmer, not less worthy of every body's regard. [Skelton] merits

attention, and religiously commands it” (Corr. 40). She received an early draft of Clarissa's

Maxims from Clarissa which she describes as “a precious little volume” and “a mirror, wherein I

see the delicacy of your good and great mind” (June 20th, 1755; Corr. 46). Richardson shared

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with Echlin some illuminating insights into his writing process and his attitude toward novels as

vehicles for educating young female readers. Tired of the oft-told, imprudent romance, Echlin

would like “to see an exemplary widow drop from [Richardson's] pen”; because “a very wicked

widow has appeared in print lately...[]...an amiable character would be an agreeable contrast”

that “would shine brightly after that black she-monster, the abominable Widow of the Wood”

(Sept. 2nd, 1755; Corr. 54). In response to his making “the passions of love [readers']

entertainment” Richardson claims that

Instruction, Madam, is the pill; amusement is the gilding. Writings that do not touch the
passions of the light and airy, will hardly ever reach the heart. Perhaps I have in mind
been too copious on that subject; but it is a subject in which, at one time or other of their
lives, all men and all women are interested, and more liable than in any other to make
mistakes, not seldom fatal ones. Your Ladyship wishes a widow might drop from my
pen; but were not this widow to have been a lover too, she would lose more than half her
merit. (Sept 22nd, 1755; Corr. 60)

Echlin agreed that literary texts ought to be vehicles for reinforcing conservative values and

shared Richardson's frustration with the female readers whom rejected such morals: Referring to

Ireland's “modish ladies” and their disdain for Charles Grandison's religious constitution, Echlin

writes: “Alas! Sir, you have thrown away pearls upon brutish mortals” (August 12th, 1754;

Barbauld 11). In addition, Echlin appreciated Richardson's strategy of using his romances as

conduits for espousing his moral directives, though creative differences would inspire her to join

the ranks of the expansionists that endeavored to rescue Clarissa Harlowe from her author's

nightmarish vision by penning an alternate ending that, by her estimation, achieved instructional

impact without forcing Clarissa – and the reader – to suffer unduly.

Echlin was equally as flummoxed as Bradshaigh by Richardson's ending to Clarissa. For

Echlin it was “impossible to describe what [she] suffered from the shocking parts of the story; in

short, the woeful complicated distress attending innocence, virtue, and religion, affected [her]

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strangely, and prevented [her from] giving a reasonable attention to the moral.” Though

“sensible of the author's laudable intention,” Echlin views Richardson's “good design” as “not

effectually answered” (August 12th, 1754; Barbauld 19). Clarissa could've been “effectually

subdued without a vile, unlikely rape”; the cruelty of her family (especially Arabella) was

provoking enough. Echlin's alternate ending rescued Clarissa from the rape and facilitated her

reunion with Mrs. Harlowe; Lovelace's fate, too, is cushioned by a total spontaneous reformation

at first seeing his dying Clarissa. Arabella marries disastrously and Mrs. Norton inherits

Clarissa's estate. Clarissa and Lovelace do die, but Echlin believed their path to the afterlife was

paved more judiciously than it had been in the source material.

Just as Bradshaigh delayed meeting Richardson in the flesh, Lady Echlin delayed

revealing her own “body” - this time, an alternate ending to Clarissa; in fact, Echlin waited six

years before she sent her alternative ending to Richardson. In August 1754 she still finds herself

“undetermined whether to consent or not, to [his] perusing all [she has] written concerning

Clarissa” (Barbauld 18). In turn, Richardson is “more desirous than ever of being favored with

[Echlin's] remarks on the History of Clarissa, now [she has] told [him] of what nature [her]

objections were, and that [she has] given the story a different turn.” He “would not be

importantly pressing” yet he “ever admired the first flowings of a fine imagination” (Sept. 12th,

1754; Corr. 21). That very month she relented, but not without a disclaimer:

After much ado about nothing, let me assure you, sir, I have more than the shadow of an
inclination to oblige you. I willingly comply with your request. Pray, dear Sir, call not the
fragment, you desire to peruse, the amended history of Clarissa. I have only attempted to
alter particular parts abruptly. It is, in short in medley. I told you I had weekly
endeavored to imitate. No matter what I intended by some foolish things, thrown
amongst the heap – if you can read it, you shall. (Corr. 32)

Echlin's language bears a striking resemblance to legalese. That she agrees to “willingly comply

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with [his] request” recalls the formality of a courtroom; that she has ‘only attempted to alter

particular parts” implies the question of intent, as if eventually she'll need to defend her

ambitions as a reader-turned-writer. The reference to her “[weak endeavor] to imitate”

Richardson's novel along with the allusion to the diaphanous nature of her writing (“if you can

read it”) paints her words as only faintly imprinted upon the page, a ghost of literary creation.

She describes the sensation of first being overcome by an impulse to write her

alternate ending, emphasizing preternatural distance:

The spirit of imagination caught first hold of my pen, and a huge leap of undigested
matter it produced, with no other view than to please myself. I cannot, without blushing,
confess, that I weakly attempted to imitate an eminent pen, and am astonished at my folly
in making such a vain attempt. I never had patience to copy this bold piece of stuff; but I
know every page wants amendment and all imaginable correction: and here I have let you
into a secret, which your late request tempted me to discover; but you must not expect to
see my poor attempt to blot out of Clarissa's story some very disagreeable circumstances
(August 12th, 1754; Barbauld 20).

Echlin's powerful description of her act of writing contrasts with the anemic language used

previously to describe its product; her alternate ending is “a bold piece of stuff” produced by a

“spirit of imagination” that “caught” forcibly “hold of [her] pen,” producing “a huge leap of

undigested matter.” She returns to the language of the court, however, in continuing to distance

herself from her writing both as action and as output. She “cannot, without blushing, confess” to

“attempt[ing] to imitate an immanent pen,” thus framing her writing as an elicit, maybe illegal,

act. Her confession then is labeled “testimony,” as though she were on the witness stand.

“[E]very page wants amendment” and “correction,” therefore characterizing her text as a convict

awaiting sentencing; this latter move shifts the responsibility from herself to the text,

underscoring its origins as a product of some hoodlum spirit having wrested the pen from her

hand, just as she wrested it from Richardson's. She is both suspect and victim.

Echlin's alternate ending received “mixed reviews” by Richardson. He remarked that

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Echlin “over[did] poetic justice,” employed the wrong writing style, and treated Arabella too

vengefully by condemning her to marriage with a charlatan (Eaves and Kimple 449). By

remarking that Echlin failed to capture the style of writing, Richardson assumes that her act of

writing is entirely derivative – that her ambition is to write as Richardson and not as an

independent mind responding to his text. Again he undercuts her (albeit, limited) writerly

authority by mocking her iteration of Lovelace (he suggests that Lovelace take to the Americas

and become a model of virtue for the colonies) What's more, he cited favorably her “Religious

Sentiments, and the Excellency of [her] Heart,” thus couching the source of her talent not in

reason, but rather in feminine emotion (my emphasis). To an extent Echlin invited this response,

as her account of writing the alternate ending is couched in language of distance and evasion –

she never, at any point, presses the solidity or relevance of this piece.

Although Richardson never acknowledged Echlin's ending as valid, he appreciated that

she maintains his emphasis on rational (religious) thinking over imagination and speculation.

Echlin invents a character by name of Dr. Christian, whose name suggests a marriage between

science and faith, between reason and redemption. Dr. Christian is the perfect teacher, judge, and

priest. As a teacher, he mentors the repenting Lovelace; as a judge, he mediates Lovelace's

reconciliation with Clarissa and delivers an important verdict – that Clarissa's family members,

not Lovelace's machinations, are responsible for her fall:

Mr. Lovelace has ingeniously acquainted me, with his irregular course of life; and has
more particularly confessed every thing, relating to you madam – and tho' I can not by
any means excuse your ill behavior to Miss Harlowe, Sir – yet! I shall declare before you
both – that, all circumstances considered, your relations madam – are more culpable, than
Mr. Lovelace! he acted consistently with the bad principle, of a wild, dissolute rake: but
natural affectation ought to have prevailed with them to treat you with some degree of
tenderness, and confined their resentment within reasonable bounds; ...[]...I have
formerly declared my thoughts to you madam, upon this point; (772-3; my emphasis)

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Dr. Christian's language, like Echlin's in describing her writing process, is of the court; He

remarks that Lovelace has “confessed every thing, relating to [Clarissa]” and declares that

Clarissa's “relations [...] are more culpable, than Mr. Lovelace!” He claims that Lovelace

“enforce[s] the reasonableness of this argument, by [his] exemplary penitence” thereby framing

Lovelace's confession as courtroom testimony (773). This scene is conceptually slippery, as

Echlin vacillates between the language of the court and doctor speak, somehow conflating

prescription and judgment. Shifting into the language of physic, Dr. Christian recommends

exercising reason and avoiding 'miserable distraction' to achieve a healthier, more virtuous (read:

religious) mindset.

As a priest, Dr. Christian supports Richardson's claim that Christian repentance originates

in the mind but may be hindered by sacrilegious, imaginative thinking. Dr. Christian muses that

impending death will “awake in [a penitent's mind] a horrible sensibility of their guilt”; to

contrast, the relatively innocent maintain a “tranquility” of mind exemplified by Clarissa's

relative calm (774). Dr. Christian praises Lovelace's newfound “well disposed” mindset, which

had previously suffered from an “internal perturbation” requiring “a cordial to his sick mind”

(773; 771). Clarissa agrees that reform is a mental endeavor by citing 'distraction' as causing her

to take “the unguarded step” with Lovelace, thus subjecting “[his] reason to predominating

passions” (772). Whereas Clarissa's troubles came from outside influences that scrambled the

signals within her brain that ought to have produced reason (“distraction” implies being acted

upon as much as it implies action) Lovelace's come from within. They are the result of “evil

communication” shutting out “sublime impressions,” or signals from God. In Lovelace's case, to

think imaginatively is to think of himself as the master of his own universe, thus his sacrilege.

He was so “immersed in that depraved state of stupidity” that his mind closed off and his soul

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blackened. Dr. Christian identifies “presumption” as fatal to an aspiring penitent, referring to the

common assumption that redemption requires only a death bed confession; to presume, in this

context, is irrationally to assume God's forgiveness based on almost no effort. Dr. Christian

marks presumption as the precise quality Lovelace lacks, and instead of damning him as

irredeemable, he holds him up as an example to other penitents. Note that in Echlin's source text

the repenting Clarissa regrets that “inexperience and presumption...[].. have been [her] ruin!”

(Letter 173, pp. 565). For Richardson, her presumption is inseparable from her engagement with

suppositional thinking – through presuming that she has control over her fate, and not passively

relying on God to sort it out, she performs the thought experiments grounded in suppositional

thinking intended to reveal a solution to her crisis; therefore, her sin is migrating away from the

rational, Christ-centered thinking that could have preserved her virtue. To reiterate: For Echlin,

Lovelace's lack of presumption makes him a good Christian, as Clarissa's eventual rejection of it

saves her from a ghastlier death. Lovelace's state of mind was once “intoxicated” but through

repentance (and his council with Dr. Christian) his “reason...[]... was awakened” and his malady

was cured (i.e., he reconnected with his Lord).

Though Echlin did not get to enjoy seeing her alternate ending published – few

experienced this, and not until the 1980s – no evidence suggests that her obscurity was a sore

point. She insists that she intended “only [...] to live quiet in this pleasure-mad world” (Dec.

13th, 1759; Corr. 96). And while Echlin only nudged the boundaries that later women writers

would seek to obliterate, her Alternative Ending to Richardson's Clarissa does earmark a

burgeoning movement: that of female admirers of male-authored works gathering the confidence

to transcend their status as reading critics to author original works of their own.

Ultimately, the tradition of reflecting suppositional thinking in literary texts, initiated by

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Richardson and engaged by Lady Bradshaigh, provided future women writers a critical sleight-

of-hand. The future “reading writers” profiled in my next chapter – Jane Austen, Sarah Fielding

and Emma Hays – represented varying forms of imaginative thinking in their works, inspired in

part by Richardson's language of supposition in Clarissa, without necessarily engaging the word

“to suppose.” While Sarah Fielding and Mary Hays use Remarks on Clarissa and Memoirs of

Emma Courtney to address Richardson directly and to make relatively accessible arguments

about imaginative engagement, Jane Austen imbeds imaginative thinking into the narrative fabric

of Pride and Prejudice in order to flag moments when female characters are vulnerable to

becoming mislead by false intelligence, usually by men. Through indicating a connection

between the imagination and male deception, Austen delivers a message that positions men in

the crosshairs of her critical gaze.

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Chapter Three
Richardson's Reading Writers:
Sarah Fielding, Mary Hays & Jane Austen

I. Introduction: The Reading Writer

During the 1740s and 1750s, Richardson was busy negotiating a notorious rivalry – one

between himself and Henry Fielding. Fielding’s novels matched his authorly persona: rebellious,

cavalier, and entirely unapologetic; in other words, his project as a writer was the polar opposite

of Richardson's. Readers aligned with one side of the rivalry or the other, and their clannishness

is well documented. According to Martin C. Battestin, Fielding and Richardson “are destined for

eternal contrast” and that while some critics prefer Richardson's “knowledge of the heart” and

his ability to move the passions others have championed Fielding's “wit and architectonic

powers” (368). They've seen Richardson and Fielding as “men of genius both, if diametrically

different in character and in the conception of their art” (233). Comparing Richardson's

characters to Fielding's, Robert Burns described them as “being of another sphere” and The

Gentleman's Magazine would refer to emerging authors as conforming either to Richardson's

style or Fielding's (51).

Of course, nobody was more affected by their rivalry than the authors in question. They

teased and disparaged each other, wildly discrediting their rival's work and reputation. Fielding

mocked Richardson's “pomposity and didactic pretensions” while Richardson implied that his

works were responsible for Fielding's celebrity as a novelist, as Fielding's Shamela was a

tremendous success and Joseph Andrews features characters lifted from the very same source

(Sabor 141). By 1754 Fielding was ready to end the rivalry, as he greatly admired Clarissa, but

that Tom Jones outsold Clarissa was reason enough to cherish a grudge; for years Richardson

denied having read Tom Jones though clues from his correspondence suggest otherwise (144).

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Richardson's correspondence with Lady Bradshaigh demonstrates how carefully this reading

critic broached Fielding's celebrity in her letters. Referring to the recent success of Tom Jones,

Bradshaigh admits that while some of her friends enjoyed the novel she promised “never [to

have let] a faulty word or action pass [her] without a visible disapprobation” (43). In another

letter to Bradshaigh, he remarks that Pamela “taught [Fielding] how to write to please,” taking

credit for his style if not his product (Sabor 141). In awe of Clarissa, Fielding was ready to give

up the rivalry by 1755. Richardson would continue to ridicule Fielding for the remainder of his

life, though his seriousness in the endeavor remains questioned by select critics.

Sarah Fielding, Henry's sister and Richardson's protégé, found herself caught at the center

of their rivalry. Richardson and Henry were the two most influential members of Sarah's 'densely

structured, multiplex social network' of friends and correspondents, which also included Jane

Collier, James Harris, John Upton, Catherline Talbot and Elizabeth Carter (Ticken-Boon 293).

Every associate within this discursive matrix provided valuable support and feedback on her

writing, yet her tutelage under both Richardson and Henry's competing models of authorship

provided Sarah with the opportunity to see inside the mind of such disparate authors; unlike the

average eighteenth century reader, she refused to join either Team Richardson nor Team

Fielding.

While Sarah Fielding benefitted from both her mentors, her experience as go-between in

their rivalry made for some awkward moments. Following Henry Fielding's death in 1754

Richardson wrote to Sarah in wonder that “a man of family, and who had some learning, and

who really is a writer, should descend so excessively low, in all his pieces.” And remarking on

Fielding's characters, he snaps: “Who can care for any of his people?” (Michie 86). Sarah's

“tangled reception loyalties impacted the legacies of both Fieldings and their shared counterpart”

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(Michie 85). Despite her pedigree, Richardson lauded Sarah as a writer though her works often

were overshadowed by Henry's popular success. From Richardson's perspective, he and Sarah

Fielding were in league as victims of Henry's literary celebrity, which rested on tales of bawdy

dissipation. Richardson compares Henry's understanding of writing to “the knowledge of the

outside of a clock-work machine,” while Sarah's was characterized by “all the finer springs and

movements of the inside” (Michie 69). It was a matter of surface versus substance, one-

dimensional junk storytelling versus writing that was rational and substantive.

Richardson's praise of Sarah's writing at the expense of Henry's responded in part to the

editorial control Henry exerted over Sarah's works, sparking confusion over the authorship of

David Simple. While most modern critics insist that Henry edited mainly for grammar and

spelling, many critical authorities of the day assumed that Sarah's works were entirely Henry's,

and that two authors in one family was too much a hoax (especially if the other Fielding was a

woman). Despite a special preface to David Simple denying his authorship, not to mention

evidence of Sarah Fielding's intelligence (she was an accomplished Greek scholar, having

translated Xenophon into English) eighteenth century critics were so dismissive of her claims to

authorship that she resorted to embedding her works with hints of an alliance with Richardson,

something that never would have appeared had Henry authored them. Janine Barchas argues that

Sarah Fielding's innovative use of the dash in her novels was her calling card of sorts, her

attempt to wrest authority from Henry by “[aligning] her novel with a Richardsonian literary

tradition” he rejected (633). As both authors 'strove to claim Sarah for their own, the less able

they were to make accommodations to each other' (Sabor 149).

Sarah's correspondence with Richardson would situate her as yet another devoted reading

critic, in the same camp as Lady Bradshaigh and Lady Echlin; however, her status as a published

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author during her lifetime (however contested) means she transcended this title to occupy

another: that of reading writer. Having imbibed of Richardson's voluminous novels, she

graduated to producing works inspired and mediated by them. Between 1744 and 1762 Sarah

Fielding published ten original works, including The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and its

companion piece Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple (1747), her

experimental piece The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754), and a pamphlet: Remarks on

Clarissa, Addressed to the Author (1749). An open letter to Richardson recounting a social

occasion where she and fictional readers share their critiques of Clarissa, Fielding described her

Remarks as a 'Scene of Criticism.' Her characters range about on a meta-discursive stage,

performing popular readings of Clarissa that circulated through real reading communities.

Emily C. Friedman notes that Sarah Fielding intended for readers to “see their own faults

reflected in Fielding's characters and then watch from an increasingly objective distance as those

characters will reform or become irredeemable” (312). To an extent, Sarah Fielding was

contributing to efforts by Richardson to steer readers toward more suitable interpretations of his

works while reclaiming imaginative thinking as a self-reflexive device for coaxing readers

into more rational reading practices. Mainly, by correcting them of habits of mind likely to

produce misogynist readings of Richardson's Clarissa.

Little of Sarah Fielding's correspondence with Richardson survives, so critics can only

speculate on how closely – and openly – she aligned herself with Richardson's stance on women.

She considered Clarissa as too unrealistic to be a model for virtuous womanhood but likely

appreciated Richardson's relatively progressive picture of woman's capacity for reason and her

need for equality in marriage. To this extent, Richardson was a better advocate for women

readers than Henry Fielding, as the latter incorporated what Katherine Rogers describes as “the

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new sensibility into the old system of male dominance,” the “new sensibility” being an emerging

sense that women required, and deserved, a greater degree of power in choosing their husbands

and exercising reason in defending themselves against base treatment (257). Though Henry

Fielding condemned men who abused their wives physically and emotionally, his female

characters are more likely than Richardson's to “submit to husbands and fathers without

questions and without limit” (257). In contrast, his rival “represented women as autonomous

beings rather than appendages to fathers, brothers, lovers or husbands,” something Sarah

Fielding likely noticed and appreciated (256). While no evidence exists to suggest that Henry

was anything but kind to and supportive of his sister, Richardson's works simply provided a

stronger platform upon which her own ambitions for portraying women as capable of rational

thought could rest.

Her ambitious pamphlet Remarks on Clarissa is divided into three “Scenes of Criticism”

that unfold over different stages of Clarissa's release to the public. Fielding positions herself as a

dispassionate observer, only present to provide testimony later in her open letter to Richardson.

Mrs. Gibson, the pamphlet's chief voice of reason, does the work of nudging reductive readers

toward more rational readings of the novel's chief themes. The first “Scene” takes place during

an impromptu gathering of friends during which shortsighted responses to Clarissa are modeled

for the reader. Having only read the first two volumes of Clarissa, they bemoan its length: “One

had no Patience to read it, Another could not hear it, a Third did not like it” (4). One nameless

male reader mentions that his “chief objection was to the length of it, for that he was certain he

could tell the whole story contained in the first two Volumes in a few Minutes.” Through Mr.

Clark, Fielding confronts these complaints: “it plainly appears, the Author's Intention is to

Impress Deeply on the Reader's mind, the peculiar Character of each Person in the Family,”

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therefore reminding the party (and the reader) that Clarissa is an authored thing, and that readers

ought to respect the author's intentions for them (8).

She flags authorial intention again in the pamphlet's lengthier “Second Scene of

Criticism”: dinner with a smaller and soberer group of readers with disparate points of view.

Already this scene appears more promising than the last, as the players involved here appear

older and wiser; appearances prove deceiving however, as the group agrees that Mrs. Harlowe

“was to blame” for Clarissa's folly and that her character's weakness reflected poorly on

Richardson's ability to write realistic characters. Mrs. Gibson, again Fielding's stand-in,

corrects this fallacy: “Mrs. Harlowe's Faults might not be thrown on the Author, unless it

could be proved that he himself intended her Conduct should deserve no Censure” (9). Here

Gibson attempts to coach her audience into a more critical and nuanced reading of Clarissa's

mother, one that does not depend on surface-level engagement. She points out that Mrs. Harlowe

may have thought she “might gain more Influence by seeming to Comply,” citing the “many

hints she gives, that if she was left to herself, it would be otherwise;” likewise, “a long Habit of

Submission is often accompanied by a want of Resolution, even where Resolution is

Commendable” (10). As such, Fielding reclaims Richardson as a writer that – if read correctly –

can expose the unfortunate habits of mind that lead to blaming female liability where

institutionalized disempowerment is at fault. Here Mrs. Gibson gets the last word: “so in

the Mind, the very Virtues themselves, if not carefully watched, may produce very hurtful

maladies.” In the context of Fielding's remarks that watchman, the one carefully policing readers'

thought process, is reason itself.

Fielding's “Second Scene” introduces the pamphlet's most pivotal reader: Bellario, a

critic, whose poor reasoning suggests that often not even literary experts read rationally,

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choosing instead to slam a worthy piece without taking the time to understand it. We learn that

his “known Taste and Impartiality made all those who wished Reason instead of Prejudice might

Judge of the Subject before them, rejoice at his Presence” (13). His arrival prompts Gibson to

expound on the folly of misguided thought, remarking that

Partiality or Prejudice generally sit as Judges: If the former mount the Judgment-seat,
how many different Terms do we make use of to express the Goodness in another,
which our own fluctuating Imaginations only have erected (14)

For Gibson (and Fielding) poor reason literally limits language. If our minds are closed by

“Partiality” then our vocabularies shrink – we find it increasingly difficult to access the kind of

language required to engage others fairly. Soon we discover that Bellario, whose initial

description inspired talk of reason, disappoints. His “Objections arose so fast, it was impossible

to guess where they would end. Clarissa herself was a prude – a Coquet – all the Contradictions

mentioned some Time ago in a Printed Paper, were laid to her charge” (13). Interestingly

enough, Bellario's complaints resemble Henry Fielding's following the publication of Pamela,

though whether Sarah Fielding designed Bellario as his cipher will remain a mystery. For now

and perhaps forever, scholars can only explore the irony of Bellario's uncritical critic.

Only when Mr. Dellincourt invokes the popular tale of Henry and Emma does Bellario

reveal the full extent of his ignorance. Remarking on Clarissa's lack of passion for Lovelace, he

insists that “he was sure Clarissa could not in the remaining Part of the Story convince him, that

her Characteristic was Love; for nothing less than the lovely Emma's passion for Henry would be

any Satisfaction to him, if he was a lover” (19). Until Clarissa's behavior reflects Emma's, he

cannot consider her character as truly amiable. As the story goes, Emma's suitor Henry tests her

virtue and devotion by renouncing his love and claiming to be a murderer, a fraud, and a cheat.

He commands that she travel the world with him and his new mistress, and in confirmation of

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her loyalty, she consents. Eventually Henry reveals the ruse and marries Emma. Gibson, whose

engagement with her guests has been so far quite fair, even detached, proclaims that she “often

[has] been sorry that the Poem of Henry and Emma had not been long ago buried in oblivion.”

Gibson's remark initiates an essential turn of conversation, one endeavoring to correct men of

poorly-reasoned claims positioning women as martyrs. After listening to Dellincourt compare

Clarissa unfavorably to the long-suffering Emma, he agrees that Clarissa suffers in comparison.

This alliance between the foolish Dellincourt and the purportedly rational Bellario demonstrate

that while many associate fallacious reasoning with women, to misread is equal opportunity, and

is not confined to one type of reader. Gibson requests that Bellario reimagine the tale through a

different critical lens – a basic strategy in any reasonable analysis. Gibson argues that to “strip it

[the story] of the dazzling Beauties of Poetry,” would mean the story “thus fairly be told”; that is,

Fielding asks that Bellario consider the story without the pleasing veneers that so often obstruct

reason. Mrs. Gibson shows Bellario (and her own reader) that as a reader he gains an exclusive

vantage point shielding him from the impact of Henry's behavior toward Emma. Thanks to

storytelling conventions, Bellario knows that Henry only pretends to be a rake and accordingly

Gibson forces Bellario to consider this: if Henry were the “Murderer, the Vagabond, the Insolent

and ungrateful Scorner of Love he represented himself to be, would he still consider Emma a

model for readers?” Bellario agrees that given this case, and a sadder ending, Emma's name

“would have been only mentioned to deter others from the like rash steps” (21).

Notice that Sarah Fielding condemns certain narratives structures as hampering readers'

rational engagement with imaginative texts – not imagination itself. Nowhere does Fielding

indict the imagination – female or male. In fact, the Remarks demonstrates how imaginative

thinking (the act of reading itself) can strengthen reason. Fielding illustrates this through her

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engagement with Bellario:

“‘Sir, you are a Father, – and an indulgent Father, – would you have your daughter act in
such a manner?' – Bellario honestly owned he would not. 'Why then, Sir, (replied she)
please consider a Moment, and you will see the injustice of wishing another man's
Daughter should act so.’” (21)

In this passage Mrs. Gibson provides a model for how rational and instructive discourse can

follow from the act of imagining. Notice that Mrs. Gibson asks Bellario to envision alternate

circumstances. She appeals to his love for his daughter, and by doing so forces him to consider

the tale of Henry and Emma from his own perspective. Bellario admits that upon reading Henry

and Emma he'd pictured Emma as his “mistress and not that of a daughter” (22); Instead of

coding imaginative forms of thinking as separate from reason and therefore suspect, Fielding

reclaims it here as a helpful tool for inspiring the reading public to reexamine, and redefine,

standards for female behavior.

By the end of Remarks on Clarissa, Bellario is entirely reformed. The final twenty pages

consist mainly of Bellario's redaction of the poor (and rather premature) review of Clarissa he

provided for Mrs. Gibson and her guests. Structured as a letter within Fielding's open letter,

Bellario's redaction reads like an itemized list of praises. He represents the critic reformed,

observing that not until he “enter[ed] so heartily into the Design of the Author of Clarissa” did

he appreciate its merit. The now-admiring Bellario is “ashamed to confess, that the Author's

Design is more noble and his Execution of it much happier, than I ever suspected till I had seen

the whole” (34). He praises Richardson's use of the epistolary structure, remarking that

Richardson “beautifully made use of every labyrinth, in the several minds of his Characters, to

lead him to his purposed End.” Richardson “seems to have a right to make his own laws” (35).

As Sarah Fielding made little effort to stress that she authored Bellario's letter-within-a-letter, it

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provides an auxiliary, male-authored critical text within her female-authored Remarks,

legitimizing it through the presence of an authoritative male voice; what's more, Bellario's letter

promotes Richardson's novel, situating Sarah Fielding chiefly as mediator of the critical 'Scenes'

from which her own readers draw alternative models of reading.

This remainder of my chapter will demonstrate that later reading writers – namely Mary

Hays and Jane Austen – use their original novels to extend Richardson's claim that imaginative

thinking can be detrimental to reason while discrediting the implication in his work that such

thinking is gendered exclusively female. Referring back to my chapter on Richardson's Clarissa,

recall that Richardson's heroine blames her irrational, sacrilegious behavior on 'presumption' : for

as long as she was supposing, which was presuming undue control over her destiny and

allowing fruitless speculation to dominate her thinking. Lovelace supposes too, but only after

entering a feminized state of powerlessness that signals his fall. Richardson admitted freely that

his project as a writer was to model for his women readers (not just readers, but women readers)

the impact that a runaway imagination has on reason. Of course, Richardson was more

progressive than today's reader might think – that in unabashedly misogynist England he even

considered women capable of reason is enough to call him their champion; as previously

mentioned, even Henry Fielding was dismissive of female reason despite Sarah's example.

When you consider that Richardson's novels fail to portray access to reason as a problem for

men however, we do encounter evidence of prejudices about women's thinking. While he

believed that women were capable of reason, and had good reason for thinking so, he identified

their gender – not poor education – as the root of the problem.

As iconic writers of late eighteenth-century feminist tracts, including most notably Mary

Wollstonecraft, fought back against assumptions of women's innate irrationality and the male

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authors that perpetuated these attitudes, other accomplished female writers and devoted readers

of Richardson were caught between two ideologies. Could female writers support claims by

certain male authors about the imagination's potential for obstructing reason without appearing to

endorse gendered presuppositions about female intelligence? Like Fielding, Mary Hays and Jane

Austen – both devoted readers of Richardson – activate debates about female liberty through

their literary characters’ direct engagement with Clarissa or else by having them model distinctly

Clarissian behavior, using women's damning lack of access to social information as their hook.

Because women were often confined to their neighborhoods and inhibited by restrictive cultural

norms, they lacked access to the social information available to men, who were freer and more

likely to travel the social information highways along which news of marriages and scandal often

were exchanged. Without access to such a highway, women were unequipped for engaging

reason, and without reason, they were forced to rely on imaginative thinking to fill the gaps

between what they knew and longed to know.

Mary Hays invokes Clarissa boldly, paraphrasing chunks of text in a stage of the novel

when her heroine Emma Courtney has fallen victim to imaginative thought, though remaining

quite cognizant enough to blame Mr. Harley enabling her through failing to share information of

his marriage to another woman – information she fails to learn from others by virtue of her

relative isolation. In Austen's case, by translating imaginative thinking into self-reflection,

Elizabeth Bennet attains entry into a rational thought process allowing her successfully to

interrogate the prejudices that result from ignorance and short-sighted thinking; in this sense,

both Hays and Austen emphasize the dangers of imaginative thinking if not properly directed

(thinking encouraged, admittedly, by novel reading). To varying extents, Austen and Hays frame

imaginative thinking as a powerful tool for strengthening reason and thereby protecting them

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against bad men and the male-dominated systems that control their access to the social

intelligence upon which they build their reason.

II. Mary Hays and the Gendered Information Highway

Of all the bondage, mental bondage is surely the most fatal; the absurd despotism which
has hitherto, with more than gothic barbarity, enslaved the female mind, the enervating
and degrading system of manners by which the understanding of women have been
chained down to frivolity and trifles, have increased the general tide of effeminacy and
corruption ~ Letters and Essays

For Hays, reason was holy. Born the same year as her mentor, Mary Wollstonecraft,

Mary Hays shared with her a legacy of campaigning for reforms to female education that would

place more emphasis on reason and less on strictly feminine pursuits. The child of Dissenters,

Hays considered it her responsibility to follow the “’Enlightenment Mandate' or [inquiring] as if

inquiry itself were gender neutral” (Idea 5). Her own feminist tracts quote from Wollstonecraft's

Vindication, a risky move considering the controversy surrounding Wollstonecraft’s romance

with American radical Gilbert Imlay, with whom she had an illegitimate daughter. Along these

lines, Gina Luria Walker notes that Hays and Wollestonecraft “[shared] their unconventional

ambitions and experiences as public women intellectuals who desired autonomy and equal

opportunity and natural rights and, perhaps, romance with radical men” (Idea 17). Both women

were as notorious for scandal as they were for letters, though history dictates that Wollstonecraft

may have had more fun. At any rate, Mary A. Waters suggests that Wollstonecraft's mentoring of

Hays 'marks the first time in the history of British letters that such a relationship between two

women writers can so clearly be traced (417).

Like Wollstonecraft, Hays was a prolific reader and writer. Her friend Jane Collier

provided Hays with a key to her personal library, where she devoured the works of Shakespeare,

Milton, Dryden, Stern, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Henry Mackenzie, and of course,

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Samuel Richardson (Walter 79). Hays was a toddler when Richardson died in 1761, so unlike

Fielding, she never enjoyed corresponding with him; however, a closer look at Hays' Emma

Courtney proves she didn't require Richardson's acquaintance for him to be a resilient presence

in her fiction. From her compilations Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793) and

Cursory Remarks on an Inquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship

to the largely Wollstonecraft-inspired Female Biography: or, Memoirs of Illustrious and

Celebrating Women of All Ages and Countries (1803) and her Appeal to the Men of Great

Britain in Behalf of Women, traces of Richardson's influence are profuse. Eventually Hays took

up publishing children's books, among them Harry Clinton: or, A Tale for Youth (1804),

Historical Dialogues for Young Persons (1806-08), and Family Annals; or, the Sisters (1817),

thus proving her range as a female writer devoted to her craft.

As did Wollstonecraft and other vocal women writers, Mary Hays received tremendous

criticism; as a vocal supporter of Wollstonecraft, she was considered more likely to engage in the

so-called licentious, masculine behaviors that journalists cited in discrediting Wollstonecraft

(Walker 124); ironically, such criticism cut both ways, as the public ridiculed her being too

unlike her mentor, citing Hays' weight and thinning hairline in their ad hominem attacks (Free

22). Accounts of her appearance led M. Ray Adams to remark in 1940 that “nature was very

unkind to her in both face and figure, she had to resort wholly to philosophy, and Cupid's wings

were clipped” (Walker 472).
17

Socially awkward, Hays preferred letters to social calls, and the

casual style of her letter writing often would dumbfound her correspondents, as she would make

her erotic desires the subject of conversation; for other detractors, her call for applying reason in

female education was sacrilege (Walker 11). She countered by arguing that all minds are capable

17
For more on Hays' public abuse, see Gina Walker's extensive account of Hays' life and works.

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of reason, a gift bestowed to them by “a superior, and Intelligent Artist” (L&E 161). But despite

her intelligent rebuttals, Hays was for most people “at best a pedant, at worst an embarrassment,

and, somewhere in between, a clown” (Walker 2).

Books were her most trusted friends, as they could respond only dumbly to her

awkwardness. Richardson's Clarissa was such a favorite that Hays read it

repeatedly in very early life, and ever found my mind more pure, more chastened more
elevated after the perusal of it. The extreme youth and beauty, fine talents, and exalted
piety of the heroine, render her character, I allow, something like the fine ideal beauty of
the ancients...The characters are well preserved, and the epistolary style of the several
writers marked with peculiar distinction (Letters and Essays, No. VII; 95- 6)

Considering Clarissa's length, Hays' rereading marks her as devoted, indeed. She did

acknowledge criticism about Clarissa length yet still she “perceived, in the nicer shades and

touches, the hand of a master” (L&E 96). Like Wollstonecraft though, her sentiments were

largely mixed. She viewed the models for women set forth by Richardson and other male authors

as “irrelevant to her experiments in self-dissection as the woman of feeling ...[]...emphasizing the

difference between her heroine and Richardson's idealized Clarissa” (Walker 138). Hays' mixed

reactions to Richardson's masterwork play out in Memoirs of Emma Courtney, her semi-

autobiographical tribute to the virtues of reason and the pitfalls of sensibility, of engaging

the imagination instead of reason; in fact, it would appear that both Clarissa and Memoirs of

Emma Courtney share a founding principle: that engaging the imagination too heavily creates a

barrier to the kind of rational thinking that enables Christian thinking. Despite their differences

in opinion about the extent to which women ought to serve as models for virtue, Hays supported

Richardson's argument that regardless of sex, one's capacity for recognizing and then fulfilling

their role in a Christian universe is contingent on their capacity for allowing reason to triumph

over imagination.

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As my first chapter demonstrates, Richardson activates this conversation through

portraying the dangers of supposing – that is, indulging too heavily in a speculative form of

thinking associated with coercion and fraud. Clarissa's suppositional ramblings prevent her from

engaging in the rational thought experiments that ought to have prevented her from retreating

with Lovelace and becoming a victim of sexual violence. While Hays engages the word suppose

more often in her didactic texts, less evidence suggests that she deployed it with the elasticity

Richardson did. Like Richardson, however, she explores the connection between imaginative

thinking and religious salvation, evidenced by her fictional and nonfictional works. Richardson

would whole heartedly agree with Hays' conviction that “Faith is not a magical word...[]... but

the result of that degree of evidence, which is proportioned to the capacity of every individual”

(75). Hays's preface to Letters and Essays mentions that she “[takes] up by the pen” for the

purpose of “meliorating the human mind – how weak, or imperfect soever – must in the sight of

that being whose nature is pure benevolence, and no effort will be lost” (ix). The idea was to

“restore degraded woman to the glory of rationality, and to a fitness for immortality” (21).

Ultimately, Hays considers imagining beneficial when “wisdom” can “be supposed” from “the

Creator and Father of all” (L&E 161). When God sanctions thinking imaginatively, only then it

is holy and no longer the sacrilege that it is in Clarissa, thus situating Hays as agreeing with

Richardson on the point that thinking, or certain forms of thinking, are the key to Christian

salvation.

Like Sarah Fielding, Hays got clever about repackaging as novels her original work

inspired by Richardson. For Hays, novels were “the natural beginning place for female

education” – though, like Richardson, she cautioned against reading only to stimulate the

passions (Miriam 241). Her debt to Richardson is wildly obvious in Memoirs of Emma Courtney

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(1796). Published almost thirty years after Clarissa, Emma Courtney follows the tragic life of its

eponymous heroine as she loses her parents and is taken in by distant relations. Later she falls in

love with a secretly married man, and in her heartbreak marries Montague, who also dies,

leaving her to spend her life as the adoptive mother of Augustus' son. Like Clarissa Harlowe,

Emma discovers early in life the joys and pitfalls of unsupervised and imaginative reading.

Courtney often reads like a valediction to the fictional worlds fostered in the mind by reading,

though such worlds often are the stuff of nightmare and divergence. The eponymous heroine

describes her happiest social engagement with friends as involving theatrical moments of

performing scenes from novels:

In my sports with my companions, I acted over what I had read: I was alternately the
valiant knight – the gentle damsel – the adventurous mariner – the daring robber – the
courteous rover – and the airy coquet. Ever inventive, my young friends took their tone
from me. (15)

For Emma, reading created opportunities for vicarious adventures. Her “[e]mulation was

Roused,” and she envisioned herself as “a wonderful scholar” (15). Emma's description of

vacillating between the “knight” and “damsel”, the “rover” and the “coquet” portrays reading as

a sexually subversive, even coercive , game of masquerade. The male roles she plays in this

reader's theater involve aggression and risk, even violence, while her female characters are

“gentle,” “airy,” almost diaphanous, invisible. In Letters and Essays Hays described imaginative

reading as “frivolous, if not pernicious” (90), the latter adjective referring at the time to anything

“severe or harmful” but also “villainous, wicked” (OED). In this context, trying on such roles

violates a woman's social script, and risks not only offending tradition but also inflaming the

passions and obstructing a young woman's capacities for reason.

Passages exist in Emma Courtney that allude strikingly, even directly, to scenes in

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Clarissa when the overly imaginative heroine became vulnerable to misunderstanding and

therefore duplicity. According to Gina Walker, Hays was “curious to learn about the mental

processes of learning” and worked to “explain how woman's existence might legitimately center

in her head, differently, perhaps, but equally, as a man's might” (Idea 14). Like Richardson,

Hays was concerned not by a cerebral state of mind but rather its conditions (Walker). Due to

lack of proper guidance early in life, poor parenting is as crucial here as in Clarissa – Hays'

Emma leans on an imaginative model of thinking that runs counter to reason. “A child in the

drama of the world,” her “mind panted for freedom, for social intercourse, for scenes in motion,

where the active curiosity of [her] temper might find a scope wherein to range and speculate”

(32). She lapses into agitated mindsets inspired by a “train of overwhelming reflection” in which

she must “disentangle the close-twisted associations” that result; this agitation is worsened by

prolonged periods of Clarissian isolation (28). Following her conflict with Mrs. Harley, Emma

“shut herself up whole days in [her] apartment, at Morton Park, or wandered through its now

leafless groves, absorbed in meditation – fostering the sickly sensibility of my soul, and nursing

wild, improbable, chimerical, visions of felicity” (61). Echoing Clarissa's experience as well as

Richardson’s mandates that imaginative thinking shouldn't trump reason, Hays' Emma claims

that her “own boasted reason has been, but too often, the dupe of imagination” (46).

Eventually Hays invokes Richardson's Clarissa more directly. Plunged into devastation

by Mr. Harley's confession that he is engaged, Emma “made many indirect inquiries of [their]

common acquaintance, with a view to discover the object of [Mr. Harley's] attachment.” He is “a

perfect enigma” whose epistles and spoken words “[tend] to increase the mystery,” throwing

Emma into 'a restless, an insatiable, curiosity.' Falling victim to 'conjecture,' she “left room for

the illusions of fancy, and of hope” but in “vain were all [her] expostulations” (101). She

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remarks that 'objects seen through obscurity, imperfectly discerned, allow to the fancy too free a

scope' causing her mind to become “debilitated” (102). In a letter to Harley she writes:

'Much,' said I, 'as I esteem you, and deeply as a thousand associations have fixed your
idea in my heart – in true candor of my soul, I, yet, feel myself your superior. – I recollect
a sentiment of Richardson's Clarissa that always pleased me, and that may afford a test,
by which each of us may judge of the integrity of our own minds – 'I should be glad that
you, and all the world, knew my heart; let my enemies sit in judgment upon my actions;
fairly scanned, I fear not the result. Let them ask me my most secret thoughts; and,
whether they make for me, or against me, I will reveal them'

This passage features the novel's only direct reference to Clarissa yet Hays situates it within a

pivotal chapter – the one in which Emma gains confidence and challenges the character of Mr.

Harley. The quote from Clarissa galvanizes her against charges of inappropriate behavior and

situates confession as the antidote to Harley's crime of withholding social information from her

(his marriage).

Almost immediately thereafter, Emma repeats her charge against him:

Had I not, in the wild career of fervent feeling, had sufficient strength of mind to stop
short, and to reason calmly, how often, in the bitterness of spirit, should I have accused
you of sporting with my feelings, by involving me in a 'hopeless maze of conjecture' – by
leaving me prey to the constant, oppressive, apprehension of hearing something, which I
should not have the fortitude to support with dignity; which, in proportion as it is
delayed, still contributes to harass, to weaken, to incapacitate my mind from bearing its
disclosure. (103)

Had Harley shared advanced knowledge of his engagement, he might have prevented Emma

from so great an attachment; in addition, it would have spared her from “the constant,

oppressive, apprehension of hearing something,” and the violence of revelation. By not ensuring

that Emma is privy to his engagement, Mr. Harley ensures her involvement in “hopeless,”

speculative labyrinth. Hay's emphasis on the distinctly male crime of keeping social information

from women brings her in line with Jane Austen, whose novels often concern how often women

suffer from the caginess of their laconic love objects.

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Over time Hays became increasingly “omnivorous in her interests and protean in her

reactions” (Free 21). She sought for herself “an extraordinary destiny” but over time would

despair over her failure to make major inroads toward reform for women's education (318).

Through her fiction however, she provided fodder for future reading writers like Austen,

accomplished novelists who came of age with Emma Courtney and inherited the question of how

modes of thinking impact women. In 1816 Austen published Pride and Prejudice – the western

world's most iconic and frequently adapted romance. Its heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, falls victim

to the cognitive trip wires laid by imaginative thinking, though Austen is less committed to

advancing Richardson's project of separating imaginative thinking from reason as she is in

portraying how male characters engage women's imaginations in order to obscure social realities

and advance their own ambitions.

III. Jane Austen: Pride, Prejudice, and Imagination

In 1775 a Richardson fan girl was born: Jane Austen. Her enthusiasm for Richardson's

novels is a critical commonplace – we know she spent several years adapting Sir Charles

Grandison into a stage play and that Clarissa was a fixture in her library. Critics have argued for

Grandison's impact on both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility; in fact, Jocelyn

Harris locates Richardson's influence in the portrayal of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy,

describing them as versions of Harriet Byron (102) and Charles Grandison respectively (110).

Olivia Murphy points out that in Sense and Sensibility Austen takes a jab at Richardson's portrait

of female anxieties surrounding city life, choosing to model Marianne's reaction to her mother's

visit to London on Clarissa's fearful remarks about the city (64). P. Shaw Fairman has identified

some of the most iconic products of Richardson's imagination as the antecedents of Austen's

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beloved characters, insisting that she drew on both Clarissa Harlowe and Anna Howe in

developing her heroines, particularly Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, whose “spirit”

suggests a “good measure of pride, for pride is one of the leitmotivs in Clarissa Harlowe” (31).

Fairman argues that even though Austen adopted Richardson's epistolary method for Lady Susan

and early drafts of Sense and Sensibility, it was her trademark free indirect style encouraged

readers to interpret the behavior of her characters in disparate ways (Fairman). This attitude

differed tremendously from Richardson's, who was “famously uneasy” about readers not

interpreting his text how he intended (Waldron 91). Austen's project was “to refashion fiction as

she knew it” (Fairman16).

Austen, like Flaubert, was an innovator of style and a forerunner of the novel's

experiments with consciousness. Graham Hough describes her narrative style, long called

free indirect discourse, as “colored narrative” – a form of storytelling “deeply colored by a

particular” character's point of view (Hough 201). These “passages of colored narrative [...]

characteristically occur in scenes of undeception, of anagorisis, where things are at least

recognized for what they are” (Hough 213). This critical viewpoint provides an occasion for

analysis of Austen's engagement with imaginative thinking because these very moments of

anagorisis, or “undeception” result from moments when female characters' are duped by their

own overactive imaginations. Austen's “colored narrative” is so vibrant because her characters

find themselves continually duped by their limited perspective, which is all the more constricted

thanks to their limited access to a gendered information highway that elects only men as social

toll operators. Austen rejects the re-appropriation of imaginative thinking for active instruction;

in other words, Austen rejects the model followed by Sarah Fielding and Mary Hays that views

imaginative thinking as a tool for teaching men how to view women; instead, Austen sees

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imaginative thinking as flagging when female characters lack self-awareness or become deluded

by men. For Austen, to imagine isn't to place oneself or one's reader in an imaginative thinking

bubble facilitating rational instruction; rather, to imagine is often to delude, to become caught up

in the trappings of sensibility, thereby remaining complicit in a social hierarchy in which men

manipulate or conceal the social information upon which women are forced to devise strategies

determining their livelihood in the age of the entail.

In Pride and Prejudice, Austen's key terms vary widely. Often she engages Richardson's

favored verb to suppose as a marker for when limited access to legitimate social information

causes female thinking to rely too heavily on assumption and speculation – or, to engage

Austen's title, on prejudice. But just as often, Austen's narrative transcends the language of

supposition to broaden her conception of imaginative thinking to include general assumption and

short-sightedness. This section defines social information as intelligence indicating marital status

(is he/she married?), general marriageability (do I want to marry him/her?) and moral character

(whose allegiance is worth forming? who ought I avoid?). At a time when being seen engaging

in flirtatious behavior with an unsavory man could severely compromise your reputation and

marriage prospects, access to such information for women was crucial. As most of Austen's

novels indicate, lacking accurate social information could lead to behaviors that sabotage their

happiness by leaving them, at best, dependent on others.

II.

In a novel about strange and unexpected inroads to love, Mr. Collins' uproarious

misapplication of courtship conventions makes the reader wonder precisely where he gets his

information. Alice Villasenor argues that Richardson's specter looms large over Collins'

principle scenes, suggesting that Mr. Collins embodies the male reader who gathers his “odd

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notions of the workings of elegant females” from Richardson's novels (134). He absorbs

uncritically the attitudes and etiquette reflected in Richardson's novels, assuming what he reads

still reflects reality. Mr. Collins is out-of-step, and out of touch. Mr. Collins' social missteps also

highlight how arcane these principles were as attitudes toward marriage were changing,

becoming increasingly based on love instead of filial negotiation. To Olivia Murphy's study

elegantly delineating Austen's tendency to model certain plots on Richardson, I'd like to

contribute a discussion of Mr. Collins as Austen's answer to Clarissa's 'dreaded Solmes' – a

move reinforcing Richardson as Austen's literary forefather.

Like Roger Solmes, Mr. Collins symbolizes the wildly misogynist inheritance practices

that position women as chattel. Accordingly, Collins' behavior at Longbourne is grossly

mercenary, as we soon discover that his goal is mainly to assess future property, both animate

and inanimate:

He was interrupted by a summons to dinner; and the girls smiled on each other. They
were not the only objects of Mr. Collins' admiration. The fall, the dining-room, and all its
furniture were examined and praised; and his commendation of everything would have
touched Mrs. Bennet's heart, but for the mortifying supposition of his viewing it all as his
own future property. (57)

Though nothing about Mr. Collins would suggest that he possesses a lively imagination, it would

be a mistake to call him unimaginative. In fact, Mr. Collins imagines a great deal. In the passage

above, he imagines himself the master of Longbourne, envisioning the 'dining-room, and all its

furniture' as his own. Mr. Collins' perfunctory perusal of his “future property” contrasts heavily

with the gaiety of the Bennet girls, rendering it more ludicrous that Mr. Collins conceptualizes

them as objects, as equivalent to the tables and chairs he “examined and praised.” Later, Collins'

easy transition between Jane and Elizabeth reflects womens' interchangeability within the

marriage economy, a fact that had changed little since Richardson's time. Since a wealthier

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bachelor has already laid claim to Jane, the objectively prettier acquisition, Collins immediately

“set about [his courtship of Elizabeth] in a very orderly manner, with all the observances which

he supposed a regular part of the business” (91). His perfunctory behavior supports P. Fairman's

claim that Austen, like Richardson, wished to expose “the manifest discrimination made between

sons (especially elder sons) and daughters” (Fairman 29).

Both Richardson and Austen's symbol for women's trade in marriage are remarkably

similar, both in character and appearance. Solmes shares his “ugly weight” with Collins, whose

heaviness (he is a “tall, heavy looking man”) contrasts with his age (only “five and twenty”) and

Collins' doleful narrow-mindedness conforms nicely to Solmes “vacuity of thought.” Solmes is

a ludicrous and “confident, bond staring” monstrosity, an exaggeration of sightedness that

Austen translates into Collins' gross assessment of Longbourne property. Clarissa repeatedly

refers to him as the “odious Solmes,” a designation that Mrs. Bennet adopts for Collins: “pray do

not talk of that odious man!” (62). Of course, Mrs. Bennet's disgust is short-lived, as soon she

realizes that Longbourne may be acquired through Collins' marriage to Elizabeth, the daughter

“least dear to her.” Mr. Collins, as her future son-in-law, “was now in her good graces” despite

being despised just the day before (72). Her baffling change in sentiment duplicates Mrs.

Harlowe's transition from revulsion to acceptance, insisting on Clarissa's marriage to Solmes

after remarking that had he “the Indies in possession, and would endow [Clarissa] with them,

[she] should not think him deserving of [her]” (Letter 7, pp. 40).

Collins and Solmes share a fascination with managing estates, as Collins' nonstop chatter

about the daily routine at Rosings resonates with Solmes' regard for little except “the value of

estates, and how to improve them, and what belongs to landjobbing and husbandry” (62).

Accordingly, the men try to acquire wives as they do land – by appealing mainly to their

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titleholders. Mr. Collins' rhetoric about female consent resonates with Clarissa's account of

Solmes' 'ungenerous perseverance,' exacerbated by her brother and Uncle Antony's own

invective concerning female changeability. Once Clarissa rejects Solmes, Uncle Antony

assures him that nobody is “more boisterous, nor more changeable” than woman, insisting that

Clarissa will “veer about” before finally accepting his proposal. Clarissa's continued rejection

has the “contrary effect” on him, as if her refusal of consent only enflames his desire:

Your letter had had a very contrary effect upon me to what you seem to have expected
from it. It has doubly convinced me of the excellency of your mind and the honour of
your disposition. Call it selfish, or what you please, I must persist in my suit, and happy
shall I be, if by patience and perseverance, and a steady and unalterable devoir, I may at
last overcome the difficulty laid in my way (160)

To Clarissa's “mortification and surprise,” Solmes has “persisted, and still persist[s]” (159). Like

Solmes, Mr. Collins ignores Elizabeth's refusal. In this case, he interprets it as symptomatic of

the courtship strategies deployed by “elegant females”:

'I am not now to learn,' replied Mr. Collins, with a formal wave of the hand, 'that it
is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean
to accept when he first applies for their favor: and that sometimes the refusal is
repeated a second or even a third time. I am therefore by no means discouraged by
what you have just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long' (111-12)

Mr. Collins is confident that Elizabeth means only to strengthen his “love by suspense,

according to the usual practice of elegant females” (113). Her refusal “is merely words of

course,” an “established custom of your sex to reject a man on first application” (114). The

remark is classic Austen, as frequently her novels portray the dismissal of female words, a

serious prospect as consent to marriage and sex literally is formed through them. Horrified,

Elizabeth implores him to consider her “not as an elegant female” but “as a rational creature,”

thus situating common perceptions of womanhood in opposition with their ability to claim

reason (114). In classic Solmian fashion, Mr. Collins is “persuaded that when sanctioned by the

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express authority of both [her] excellent parents, [his] proposal will not fail of being accepted.”

The comment recalls Clarissa's remark that Solmes' courtship “indeed, is to them” – that is, any

other Harlowe likely to give an affirmative (62). At least Solmes' regard for Clarissa retains the

appearance of ardor. Mr. Collins, on the other hand, had only to “change from Jane to

Elizabeth,” a feat accomplished “while Mrs. Bennet was stirring the fire” (72). No matter the

sentiment, however, both characters demonstrate how women's voices often fall on deaf ears.

***

The novel's opening pages deliver a salient picture of the gendered politics of sharing

social information. We discover that Mr. Bennet prefers the solitude of his library while his

wife's “solace” is “visiting and news” (7; my emphasis). While Mr. Bennett enjoys the

stimulation of literary characters, Mrs. Bennett must settle for the characters that people her

doorway. Mrs. Bennett suffers from “mean understanding, little information, and uncertain

temper” (my emphasis). Austen's portrait of Mrs. Bennet crystallizes Wollstonecraft's thesis on

female sensibility's incompatibility with reason and the tendency for a marriage to transform into

disdain thanks to a failure to bond intellectually. Mrs. Bennett's squashed intellect limits her

purview, particularly of her daughters' marriage prospects, making the scarcity of legitimate

social intel, or worse, the presence of illegitimate news even riskier. From the novel's opening

sequence Austen situates her novel within a larger conversation about female liberty, as marriage

is their only chance at mobility, both social and physical. Because “men control both their own –

and the female relatives’” bodily movements, the Bennet women can meet Mr. Bingley only if

Mr. Bennet visits first and arranges their introduction,' thus magnifying “the magnitude of

women's uncertainty” (Greenfield 342). Mr. Bennet continues to refuse his wife's desperate

pleas that he make Bingley's acquaintance sooner rather than later, for in the marriage economy

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timing is paramount; Mrs. Bennet literally is terrified that another family – particularly the

Lucases – will engage Bingley's attentions first. Rather peevishly, Mr. Bennet refuses to

acknowledge the gravity of the occasion, going so far as to deny any intent to visit Bingley. Of

course, this scene of the novel has comedic intentions – indeed, Mrs. Bennet's hysterical

response to her husband's feigned implacability is amusing and ridiculous and frames her already

as another female victim of the cult of sensibility. Eventually we learn that Mr. Bennett “had

always intended to visit [their neighbor], though to the last always assuring his wife that he

should not go; and till the evening after the visit was paid, she had no knowledge of it” (7). Once

Mr. Bennet divulges his secret, Mrs. Bennet calls his withholding “such a good joke,” taking

credit for having persuaded “[him] at last” (9). Her silliness contrasts with the weight of his

prank: while reinforcing his wife's pathetic status within the home, Mr. Bennet's lie of omission,

paired with his refusal to supply information, forces the female Bennets dangerously to rely on

conjecture as a means of filling in the social puzzle that is Bingley’s eligibility.

The Bennet ladies spend their evening “conjecturing how soon he would return Mr.

Bennett's visit, and determining when they should ask [their neighbor] to dinner.” The women

attacked [Mr. Bennet] in various ways – with barefaced questions, ingenious
suppositions, an distant surmises – but he eluded the skill of them all; and they were at
last obliged to accept the second-hand intelligence of their neighbor Lady Lucas. Her
report was highly favorable. (10)

Referring to women's lack of access to material items unless gifted to them by men through

marriage or filial duty, Susan Greenfield identifies “absence” as placing “greater restrictions on

women's knowledge” (338). While Greenfield astutely conflates the owning of objects with

women's objectification, I identify the harmful effects of lacking access to something less

tangible: information. Lacking information, particular social information – information about

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people, places, and events – places similar constraints on women. Alluding to the emotional

acrobatics that women must execute in deploying the social strategies that insure their survival

by marriage, the ladies 'attacked' their father with 'various' strategies of varying levels of

confrontation; their maneuvers are multifarious, even nefarious. As Greenfield states, for the

Bennet women, “news, gossip, secrets, disagreements, misunderstandings, and lies saturate

[their] social world” (343); therefore, in the absence of intelligence, their maneuvers must be

quick and dirty, executed with covert precision, and if necessary, by surprise attack. The Bennet

girls' scrappiness here calls to mind V.S. Pritchett's description of Austen as “a war-novelist,

formed very much by the Napoleonic wars, knowing directly of prize money, the shortage of

men, the economic crisis and change in the value of capital” (35). Pritchett's words alone are

capital, as they highlight what serious business marriage was for women in a century when not

even their family home represented for them lasting security.

Mr. Bennet's disinterested approach to fatherhood contrasts wildly with Mr. Harlowe's

status within Clarissa as representing “a monstrous vision of fathers who seek to control their

children's marriage choice” (Vermillion 407). Nevertheless, Mr. Bennet and Mr. Harlowe reflect

a common theme in Richardson and Austen's works – that poor filial guidance can lead to

disaster for daughters. Mary Burgan cites Mr. Bennet's “emotional carelessness” (541) in her

examination of his character as Austen's “critique of the patriarchal hierarchy as a proper

foundation for social organization.” (537). Far from an exemplar, Mr. Bennet has “directed his

talents toward ridicule and amusement rather than toward raising his children well” (459). For

Clarissa Harlowe as well as the Bennet girls, even the slightest piece of false intelligence puts

them in danger of compromising their reputations by making poor associations, if not imprudent

marriages (after all, some critics point out that Wickam's character is only a seemingly less

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benign version of Richardson's Lovelace). The social information they fail to extract from him

must arrive by chance, an unfortunate result of their social status and one that Austen makes

even worse by virtue of Mr. Bennet's cold and (reminiscent of Elizabeth's) laughing manner. In

this context Elizabeth's resemblance to her father indicates a shared propensity for behavior that

obstructs reason, a worse prospect for Elizabeth as the reason she obstructs is her own.

Elizabeth's personal quest for social intelligence is full of obstacles and largely governed

by chance. Upon witnessing Darcy and Wickam's chance encounter in Meryton, Elizabeth's

tremendous desire for social information activates a train of thought that will carry Elizabeth

through the novel. She observes that both men “changed color, one looked white, the other red”

and that “Mr. Wickam, after a few moments, touched his hat – a salutation which Mr. Darcy just

deigned to return.” She wonders: “What could be the meaning of it? It was impossible to

imagine; it was impossible not to long to know” (64). Austen's point here likely is to poke fun at

the wondering heroines in novels, whose arbitrary quest for discovery becomes the basis for their

(mis)adventures. But Darcy and Wickams' startling breach of etiquette confounds Elizabeth, and

understandably so, especially in a world that hinges on attention to social proprieties.

Elizabeth's extreme response to this confrontation makes her even more vulnerable to

Wickam's deceit, as her desire to know puts her in the position of relying on one of them for

information, and clearly it won't be the (as it turns out) more legitimate Darcy. Elizabeth “dared

not even mention” Darcy, yet she is intensely relieved when Wickam initiates the subject

himself (67). Soon after this flow of information initiates, outside factors interrupt it. Wickam

restores the flow soon enough, but the activities of the game discontinue it yet again and

discontinue the conversation until “the next opportunity of speaking.” Susan Greenfield has

identified this scene as representing one of the novel's pivotal scenes of self-deception, the

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important moment when Elizabeth commits “her gravest mistake” of taking “language too

literally,” of accepting all language as “really true” (Greenfield 343). I'd like to enter this

conversation by suggesting that by situating Elizabeth against the background of a game of

lottery tickets, she underscores the dangerous and arbitrary nature of women's search for the

social intelligence around which their lives revolve.

Elizabeth's heightened experience of this scene recalls Clarissa's distraction – the

prolonged scenes during which Clarissa can do nothing but speculate. In the interim between

Wickam's divulgences, Elizabeth wonders how Mr. Bingley, “who seems good humor itself”

could 'be in friendship with such a man? How can they suit each other?” Of Mr. Darcy she

wonders what (“after a pause”), “....can have been his motive? What can have induced him to

behave so cruelly?” After uncritically absorbing Wickam's distorted and misleading account of

his fallout with Darcy, she remarks: “I had supposed him to be despising his fellow creatures in

general, but did not suspect him of descending to such malicious revenge, such injustice, such

inhumanity as this!” Engaging in “a few minutes reflection” Elizabeth searches her mind for

whatever evidence she can find supports her present convictions. She recalls him boasting about

the “implacability of his own resentments, of his having an unforgiving temper” (70). After

another moment “again deep in thought” Elizabeth conjectures that Mr. Darcy's crime was the

worse for leveling it against “one, too, who had probably been his own companion from

childhood, connected together, as I think you said, in the closest manner!” (my emphasis). In

addition to accepting as truth information gathered from an unfamiliar source, Elizabeth can't be

sure that she has absorbed such information correctly: she only thinks that he described Darcy as

a close companion. Based on such shaky foundations, she determines that Wickam “had given a

very rational account of the dispute” (74). Of course, through absorbing Wickam's “very

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rational” testimony Elizabeth sets out on a very irrational quest to shame Darcy for his seemingly

irrational, even cruel, behavior.

By equating speculation with poor reasoning, Austen aligns herself with Richardson,

situating Elizabeth as a pseudo Clarissa figure within her own original work. However, her

concept that without proper guidance and a capacity for rational thought women's happiness is

determined largely by chance is entirely opposed to Richardson's thesis, as it does not conform to

what I termed in chapter one his 'Christian mandate'. Joel Weinsheimer’s comprehensive study

of chance and choice in Austen's novels argues that “decision and action are determined by a

variously composed mixture of choice and chance,” and that “only as a given character increases

his knowledge of self and others does choice begin to predominate.” Building on Weinstein, I'd

like to suggest that in Pride and Prejudice imaginative thinking stands in for self-knowledge,

which Elizabeth only achieves through the careful reading practices occasioning self-reflection.

Once again Austen departs from Richardson, this time by opposing his conviction that for

women, quiet reflection leads to indecision and lack of reason, not to mention a sacrilegious

mindset that places too heavy a premium on free will and denies a God-given destiny. In Pride

and Prejudice, self-reflection is an empowering activity for women, as Elizabeth achieves her

destiny not through religious thinking but through the rational discourse which expels from her

mind the assumptions and preconceptions placed there by pride and prejudice.

III.

Throughout the novel Elizabeth is more susceptible to prejudice when she thinks

imaginatively, as her musings continue to reinforce her prejudiced perception of Mr. Darcy. In

the drawing room at Rosings, Elizabeth

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could not help observing as she turned over some music books that lay on the
instrument how frequently Mr. Darcy's eyes were fixed on her. She hardly knew how to
suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so great a man; and yet that he
should look at her because he disliked her was still more strange. She could only imagine
however, at last, that she drew his notice because there was a something about her more
wrong and reprehensible, according to his ideas of right, than in any other person present.
The supposition did not pain her. She liked him too little to care for his approbation. (45)

In this passage, Elizabeth responds to Darcy's attention by engaging in acts of suppositional

thinking that clearly indicate her lack of reasoning and demonstrate how distorted women's

thinking becomes when relying on speculation to interpret their social value. While she admits

that it would be 'more strange' for him to 'look at her because he disliked her,' she immediately

ignores her own reasoning by falling back on the thing she can imagine: that she repulsed

him as a result of “something about her more wrong and reprehensible, according to his ideas of

right, than in any other person in the party.” That her “supposition did not pain her” indicates the

laziness of her thinking, for it only support the opinion of Darcy to which she already is

committed. In addition, it forms a basis for the novel's most important fact of self-deception: her

refusal to admit her attraction to Darcy. E.M. Halliday remarks that Austen preps the reader

gradually for “an essential part” of the novel “to take place in the intimate and subtle chambers

of [Elizabeth's] mind” (67) and in the context of this project I would add that Elizabeth's

“intimate and subtle chamber” resembles the echoing variety, in which conflicting modes of

thought create a dizzying static that allows prejudice to trump reason.

A few pages later, Austen invokes suppositional thinking in the context of self-deception

once again. This time, Elizabeth engages directly with her future husband:

I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and nonsense, whims and
inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can. – But these, I
suppose, are precisely what you are without. (50)

Again Elizabeth's supposition flags a moment of blindness. The great irony here is that whenever

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she gets a chance she does exactly what she purports not to do: to “never ridicule what is wise or

good.” She assumes that Mr. Darcy remains ignorant of his own “whims and inconsistencies,”

again allowing her imagination to support prejudice that prevents her for a long time from

reading Mr. Darcy as a better marriage prospect than Wickam; in other words, her interpretive

blindness leads to social blindness, which almost loses for her a chance to marry well. A page

later Mr. Darcy responds appropriately by identifying Elizabeth's “defect” as her tendency

“willfully to misunderstand” others, including himself (51).

Many critics agree that Pride and Prejudice's greatest project is to reveal the need for

more critical reading strategies at large. Elizabeth represents the uncritical readers Austen

targets; by her own admission, Elizabeth is emphatically “not a great reader” (37). Austen's

“text demands the kind of close reading, and rereading, that threatens to deny the reader the

simple pleasures promised by romantic fiction.” The novel, in other words, remains an exercise

in critical reading (Murphy 88). Accordingly we follow Elizabeth “as she moves from a belief in

her own logic to a more fluid interpretation of knowing and of intelligence in terms of

background, contexts, and particulars which inform truth” (Morgan). For Elizabeth, the

“contexts” to which Morgan refers usually involve acts of reading that inspire a form of

imaginative engagement that facilitates rational thinking.

Elizabeth's most transformative engagement with imaginative thinking arrives with a

letter from Darcy that alters her point of view so violently that it marks a stunning turning point

in the novel. In this chapter Austen rigorously foregrounds the importance of reading well

and repeatedly. Upon Elizabeth's initial reading of Darcy's letter, her “feelings” are nebulous,

“scarcely to be defined.” She was so eager to read the letter she “hardly left [herself] power of

comprehension, and from impatience of knowing what the next sentence might bring, was

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incapable of attending to the sense of the one before her eyes.” At this point, she interprets his

style as “not penitent, but haughty,” focusing on surface-level features only; as usual, she

judges on appearances only. Her attitude begins to change as Darcy changes the subject from

Jane to Wickam, which “she read with somewhat clearer attention,” as her indignation for Jane

no longer clouded her view; however, now her feelings are 'acutely painful and more difficult of

definition.' With “astonishment,” “apprehension,” and “horror” she “wished to discredit” the

letter entirely, shoving the closely-written pages back into their envelope. Had Elizabeth left it at

that, had her anxiety prevented her from re-examining the letter just moments later, her story

likely would have ended quite differently, and the reader would not have the pleasure of

discovering that Elizabeth's painful reading signifies the growing pangs associated with her

growing capacity for reason. According to Susan Greenfield, “[t]he object world recedes as

Elizabeth reads and re-reads 'every line' of Darcy's account of Wickam's perfidy, her own

thoughts becoming a line to be re-read and reinterpreted” (Greenfield 344). As Elizabeth engages

in the act of reading Darcy's letter, her own reasoning becomes a text of its own, finally available

for analysis. As a result, the real pay off for Elizabeth isn't getting Darcy's perspective on the

events – rather, it is her own self-reflection that enables self-knowledge (“Till this morning I

never knew
myself”). Through a careful rereading of her own thought process she is struck by

her own folly, describing her behavior as “blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd” (176); she admits to

having “courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away” (177).

Much of the transformative power of Darcy's letter results from Elizabeth's imaginative

engagement with it. In this respect, imagination does not prevent reason; rather, imagination

facilitates reason. Through her imaginative engagement with Darcy's letter, her mistakes play out

before her, as if projected upon an invisible screen. For example, in realizing that her conformity

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to country groupthink inspired her preference for Wickam over Darcy, Elizabeth “could see

[Wickam] instantly before her in every charm of air and address; but she could remember no

more substantial good than the general approbation of the neighborhood, and the regard which

his social powers had gained him in the mess” (175; my emphasis). In this context, Elizabeth's

now reformed imagination works in her favor through revealing its previous failings.

IV. Conclusion

To an extent, Austen contradicts Richardson's claim that self-reflection (“reflectioning”)

obstructs reason because it cuts out the middle man – in this case, God – by providing an

alternative model for female reasoning that provides women with the power to reform their

thinking independent of an ideology. Of course, Mr. Darcy provides the text that inspires

Elizabeth to read and reform her way of thinking (his letter is an antidote to her lack of reason) a

fact that signifies her underlying cynicism concerning female agency. But instead of resting my

claims on Austen's concern that women will always owe their reform to men, I want to suggest

that in response to texts like Clarissa Austen relocates the nexus of power over women from

religion to society.

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Afterword

In April 2016, The Los Angeles Times’ Noah Bertlasky challenged critics that had

recently slammed Hollywood for making more sequels than original products. These critics had

scornfully dismissed these films as “filmmakers' fan fiction,” citing among them recent

superhero franchises and the everlasting Bond series. In his piece, Bertlasky admits that “the

derivative drumbeat of Suicide Squads, Dr. Whos and James Bonds” would inspire anyone “to

wonder whether anyone will ever have an original idea ever again,” yet he insists that fan fiction

writers often are quite original after all. He remarks that “licensed or otherwise, [fan fiction] is a

way for people to talk back to narratives that exclude them, or to elaborate new possibilities in

stories they already consider theirs” (1). He cites Richardson's Pamela as the source text for

Fielding's hit Shamela, arguing that Fielding's sequel stands on its own as a respected piece of

literary history.

This would seem to suggest that Shamela ought to share designation as “fan fiction,”

which most people associate with low-brow stories originating on the Internet and lacking in

scholarly or editorial review. While the comparison may cause a few scholars to blanche, I

suggest that the comparison is only a negative one when we ignore the potential for fan fiction

as providing material ripe for robust scholarly review. A quick search on Google Scholar reveals

that many literature scholars are turning to modern fan fiction as material for intellectual inquiry,

especially the kind produced within female-dominated fan communities. Elizabeth Judge looks at

intersections between current and eighteenth-century fan fiction and its role in mediating

“unresolved and evolving views” regarding “the nature of authorship, and originality, the

integrity of fiction, and the reader's role” (3). According to Judge, “the characteristics that define

Internet fan fiction appositely describe the eighteenth-century phenomenon” of adopting

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“ongoing custodial interest toward fictional characters.” Samuel Richardson plays a key role in

Judge's study, where he figures as a “borrower of fan fiction” while revising Clarissa, pulling

ideas from the eighteenth-century “fan fiction writer” who identifies “at once [as] reader, writer,

and critic” (9). Tracing the connection between author strategies today and during the

Enlightenment, Richardson was “not averse to integrating and re-working reader comment” into

later volumes of his works, to “enrich” and enliven them – a practice not uncommon today, as

screenwriters often admit to being influenced by fans' comments in online fan communities.

Ultimately, the readers that write – and the authors that listen – perform the same gestures today

as they did over two centuries ago.

Ultimately, this project views fan fiction writers (a predominantly female group) as a

subset of today's female reading writers. These writers may not achieve status as published

writers in their lifetime, yet thanks to digital platforms their contributions reach a potentially

wider audience than many published writers enjoyed in the eighteenth century. What's more,

these writers use their imaginations to create impactful online communities that critique issues

surrounding female sublimation, identity politics, and gendered publishing schemes. This isn't to

say, however, that women must belong to fan fiction communities to be reading writers. Even

when not producing fan fiction per say, bright young readers of fiction now take to the Internet to

write and disseminate their own valuable pieces of social criticism thinly disguised as fiction.

They are the descendants of Austen and Hays, Bradshaigh and Sarah Fielding, as they use the

Internet to challenge, as Bertlasky puts it, the “narratives that exclude them.”

***

Lizzie Bennet has a mighty fine right hook.

At least, that's how it appears in the 2010 spoof film trailer “Jane Austen Fight Club,” a mash-up

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of Austen's novels and David Fincher's cult classic Fight Club. Available on Funnyordie.com,

this 3-minute viral hit features Austen's heroines duking it out (literally) for the purpose of

diversion and social advancement. Accompanied by the tag line 'we no longer were good

society,' it opens with scenes of lush English countryside played to the score of Joe Wright's

2005 Pride and Prejudice. Suddenly the camera pans to Elizabeth Bennet, turning to her walking

companion, Mansfield Park's Fanny Price, to say: “I want you to hit me, as hard as you can.”

The camera cuts to a montage of wearied Regency-era ladies playing the piano or sewing, staring

vacantly around them, perhaps in wonder of their proscription. We learn from the voiceover that

these women – Emma Woodhouse and the Dashwoods – languish day to day, faced with the

choice to marry or perish. Not even Ms. Woodhouse has the aplomb to suggest deviating from

this social script. Soon Lizzie drafts them into her underground boxing club where the most

important rule is “no corsets, no hatpins, and no crying.” The rest of the video plays to Kill Bill's

frenetic score as the ladies slap, smack, swing and punch their way through the countryside,

pushing each other into ponds and manicured landscaping features.

In a key sequence, a Dashwood sister plays the piano rapturously, almost violently, as a

quick sweep of the camera reveals a bloody gash on her right leg. Lizzie supervises the women

with sinister yet plucky glee, clad in a gaudy leopard print coat and pink feathered fascinator. A

bystander remarks: “I suppose they think this will throw them in the path of eligible young

men.” Right on cue, Fanny takes a hit and falls immediately into the waiting arms of a laconic,

buttoned-up suitor. The combination of Regency-era manners and a gritty boxing saga seem

jarring, yet somehow the video's creators manage to capture the essence of Austen's novels.

These readers-turned-writers simply have adopted and adapted Austen's theme of social

strictures turning women against one another, creating communities for women that necessitate

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sacrificing one woman's potential happiness for another's success in marriage. In the 1800s, the

marriage market really was a battleground.

The Internet's response to the video was rapturous. It received over 200,000 hits in just

two days and garnered special attention from CBS news and Buzzfeed. Almost six years after its

initial release the video still enjoys regular Facebook shares and a permanent spot in

Funnyordie's archives. Audiences recognized something in this video that goes beyond Austen,

and while little scholarship exists to unpack “Jane Austen Fight Club,” I'd like to suggest that it

exists to target the film industry's bias for male-centric film. By grafting Jane Austen – the very

embodiment of chick lit – onto Fincher's bloody bacchanal the creators of “Jane Austen Fight

Club” expose our proclivity for violence and how often we code it as male, and therefore better

or more serious entertainment. Other recent and subversive mash-ups have followed along the

same lines, including the novels Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) and its Pride and

Prejudice and Vampires (2012), both of which retain much of Austen's original prose while

obliterating the gender and genre divides that separate (masculine) horror from (feminine)

romance. In “Jane Austen Fight Club,” chick lit goes rogue.

Reader push back is not always so high profile, but that hardly matters for fans in online

communities whom empower one another without the help of a viral spotlight. Every day

thousands of Austen's reading writers quietly post their own juvenilia, some of which cross her

novels with other popular titles while remaining grounded in the current moment; digital veneers

aside, these readers' “little bit, (two inches wide) of ivory” challenge generic conventions much

the way Austen did as a teen. Often taking place in suburban neighborhoods and high schools,

their fictions lift favorite characters (Lizzy is popular, mostly for her nonconformist tendencies)

and update their struggles to reflect 21st-century experience.

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A quick “Jane Austen” search at www.fanfiction.net brings 469 hits, including

Vicky123's sequel to Persuasian, “Kellynch Hall,” and Roxy's “Pride and Prejudice Jubilee” – a

modern retelling of Austen's classic. Each fan fic has an attached forum through which readers

can post reviews and general feedback. Common crossovers include Harry Potter (for example,

slipperballoon's “Portions and Prejudice”) and (Austen fan) Stephanie Meyers' Twilight series.

The Austen-Twilight send-ups include pattyrose's “Arrogance and Animosity: A Modern

Twific” and Luvnote4u's “Conceit and Chauvinism.” Select users searching for saucier

crossovers would visit Mademoiselle R's “50 Shades of the 1800s” and mrswentworth1904's

“Polluting The Shades,” both of which combine Austen's novels with PL James's 50 Shades of

Grey, a trilogy of novels whose own humble beginnings remain on the Internet... as Twilight fan

fiction. No matter the crossover, young fan fiction writers “manipulate” and “integrate” their

source texts “using their own resources, knowledge, backgrounds and identities to construct

something new” (Leppanen 138). They become “active manipulators and designers of original

texts, using given cultural artifacts as a scaffold and launching point from which to develop

considerable and worthwhile originality.” By basing the products of their imagination on the

characters that inspired it, and sharing these products with a network of supportive online

comrades, these young and developing female writers obtain a degree of self-knowledge that

Austen's heroines might have required months, if not years, to achieve.

These reading writers owe a debt to reading writers of the 1970s, who tired of being

'marginalized from the traditionally male enclaves of speculative fiction' and formed supportive

communities for sharing their work and seeking feedback from like-minded fans. Eventually

they adopted the Internet as a wider, more elastic forum. Aside from helping them obtain helpful

criticism of their work, these communities of women help each other work through the

109

“conflicting identity scenarios they face in their lives,” and in some cases “investigate gender

and sexuality in ways that range from playful modifications to critical feminist re-writings”

(Leppanen 156). According to Monica Flegal and Jenny Roth, many fan fiction writers have “set

out to establish and police subcultural norms” (156). Lately the subcultural norm they police

concerns whether fan fiction writers should get reasonable pay for their writing, a movement

that would require overhauling the unspoken “gift economy” that has long guaranteed free

universal online access to any fan fiction published in online forums. Thanks in part to Kindle

Worlds, fan fiction writers now have the opportunity to self-publish, but many writers fear the

stigma, as many perceive self-publishing as amateurish and self-serving; no really good book

would spring to life without an endorsement from a publishing company. What's more, less

confident fan fiction writers fear the criticism that follows from exposing their work to readers

outside remarkably supportive online communities. These writers hope someday to “move more

freely” between online archives and traditional publishing (Flegal and Roth, 4). Until then, the

products of their imaginations will remain ensconced in the online world.

***

Ultimately, digital reading communities have disrupted the publishing world by

positioning the reader as capital. Some publishing companies now require author hopefuls to

show proof of a well-established online readership consisting of Twitter followers and

visitors to their blog or Tumblr. This raises a couple of interesting questions going forward: as

readers gain more influence than ever before, is the supremacy of the author less powerfully felt?

Recent tales from the auction house suggest otherwise, as well-heeled readers still throw

110

hundreds of thousands of dollars at relics that may, or may not, have once belonged to their

favorite author. On December 9th, 2013 an 1869 watercolor portrait of Austen was sold at

Sotheby's for $270,000. The portrait was based on a pencil portrait of Austen drawn by her sister,

Cassandra, just before Austen's death. As it was purchased by a private collector, many Austen

fans were apprehensive that it wouldn't be available for public display. For these fans, such

sacrilege would be equivalent to a private collector absconding with the Mona Lisa and keeping

it curtained. That same year similar concerns pit the English government against singer Kelly

Clarkson after she tried leaving the country with one of Austen's rings, purchased at auction.

England declared the ring a National Treasure, therefore keeping it English.

No similar tales of property disputes concerning Richardson's memorabilia have emerged

in recent decades. While a signed copy of The Watsons recently sold on Sotheby's.com for

$6,000,000 USD, first edition copies of Clarissa have remained unsold for a minimum bid of

$2,997. However, his cultural cache remains, even if by proxy. Like a fun house mirror, the

work of any reading writer reflects, and refracts, the project of the authors they read, making

readers complicit in an inter-textual literary legacy uniting authors across decades, possibly even

centuries. As we read Shakespeare or Milton, we also read the Bible and the Roman classics –

meaning that while experiencing Henry IV's rage we also experience the prodigal son parable,

the play's source text. As we experience Harry Potter's Hermione and Ron fumble their way to

realizing their love, we also experience any number of Austenian romances, as JK Rowling is

Austen's most famous reading writer (imagining Elizabeth Bennet as Hermione Granger's literary

ancestor is easy enough – their intelligent brown eyes give it away.) Because Austen modeled

certain key plots and characters on Richardson's own, the same logic applies to our own reading

of her novels and the ones inspired by them. Through reading Austen and her reading writers, we

111

remain readers of Richardson.

112

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation explores the dynamic between Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) and two subsets of readers: his “reading critics” (Lady Elizabeth Echlin and Lady Dorothy Bradshaigh) and “reading writers” (Sarah Fielding, Mary Hays, and Jane Austen). I ground my investigation in these readers’ responses to Richardson’s treatment of what I term “suppositional thinking,” particularly in his epistolary masterwork Clarissa (1748-51). By the late 1740s the verb “to suppose” had accumulated numerous subversive denotations, including “to imagine,” “to coerce,” and “to will into being.” My first chapter argues that in Clarissa Richardson manipulates these meanings in such a way that casts products of the female imagination (thoughts, letters, quasi-literary works) into disrepute, mainly as works born of cognitive processes counter to reason and religion. For Richardson, Clarissa’s efforts “to suppose”—to wonder, to engage her imagination—undermine her God-given destiny

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Creator Bloom, Amanda Charlotte (author)

Core Title Suppositional thinking in eighteenth-century literature: authorship, originality, & the female imagination

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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Defense Date 06/01/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

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