Born in Derbyshire to a joiner, Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) received little formal education; in 1706, he was apprenticed to a printer in London. Thirteen years later, he set himself up as a stationer and printer and became one of the leading figures in the trade. At the age of fifty, he turned his hand to writing. His epistolary novels-including his masterpiece, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1747-48)-brought him great success and a bevy of admirers.
Sheila Ortiz-Taylor is Professor Emeritus of English at Florida State University, where she taught the British and American novel, as well as creative writing and women's literature, since receiving her PhD from UCLA in 1973. A former Fulbright Fellow, she is the author of eight novels, including Homestead and Faultline.

Lynn Shepherd has a doctorate in English literature from Oxford University, and is the author of Clarissa's Painter: Portraiture, Illustration, and Representation in the Novels of Samuel Richardson, which is published by OUP. She is also an award-winning novelist, and has published literary mysteries inspired by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and the lives of the Shelleys.

Pressured by her unscrupulous family to marry a wealthy man she detests, the young Clarissa Harlowe is tricked into fleeing with the witty and debonair Robert Lovelace and places herself under his protection. Lovelace, however, proves himself to be an untrustworthy rake whose vague promises of marriage are accompanied by unwelcome and increasingly brutal sexual advances. And yet, Clarissa finds his charm alluring, her scrupulous sense of virtue tinged with unconfessed desire. Told through a complex series of interweaving letters, Clarissa is a richly ambiguous study of a fatally attracted couple and a work of astonishing power and immediacy. A huge success when it first appeared in 1747, and translated into French and German, it remains one of the greatest of all European novels.

One of the first great British novels, Samuel Richardson's classic tale became a legend to his own age and remains so today.

Defying her parents' desire for her to marry a loathsome man for his wealth, the virtuous Clarissa escapes into the dangerous arms of the charming rogue Lovelace, whose intentions are much less than honorable. This thought-provoking work, written entirely in intimate letters, exposes the delicacy and complexity of affairs of the human heart. The fatal attraction between villain and victim builds and unfolds into a relationship that haunts the imagination as fully as that of Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde.

Abridged and with an Introduction by Sheila Ortiz-Taylor and a New Afterword by Lynn Shepherd