Her emotion, like Strether's, is caught in passing; like him she
dispenses with the need of a seer, a reflector, some one who will form
an impression of her state of mind and reproduce it. The struggles of
her heart are not made the material of a chronicle. She reports them,
indeed, but at such brief and punctual intervals that her report is
like a wheel of life, it reveals her heart in its very pulsation. The
queer and perverse idea of keeping her continually bent over her
pen--she must have written for many hours every day--has at least this
advantage, that for the spectator it keeps her long ordeal always in
the foreground. Clarissa's troubles fall within the book, as I have
expressed it; they are contemporaneous, they are happening while she
writes, this latest agony is a new one since she wrote last, which was
only yesterday. Much that is denied to autobiography is thus gained by
Clarissa's method, and for her story the advantage is valuable. The
subject of her story is not in the distressing events, but in her
emotion and her comportment under the strain; how a young gentlewoman
suffers and conducts herself in such a situation--that was what
Richardson had to show, and the action of the tale is shaped round
this question. Lovelace hatches his villainies in order that the
subject of the book may be exhaustively illustrated. It is therefore
necessary that the conflict within Clarissa should hold the centre,
and for this the epistolary method does indeed provide.
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