Perhaps that's the best way to approach a classic – unawares. In the house where I was staying there was nothing else to read in English I picked it up quite ignorant of its reputation and importance. I first read Clarissa, in France, in a gold-tooled library edition of many volumes. Most critics agree that it is one of the greatest European novels whose influence casts a long shadow. To Samuel Johnson, it was simply "the first book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart".
From time to time, its length is challenged by later upstarts – most recently by Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy and Infinite Jestby David Foster Wallace – but Samuel Richardson's "History of a Young Lady" remains an extraordinary achievement. A fter Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe, the next landmark in English fiction is a towering monument of approximately 970,000 words, Clarissa, the longest novel in the English canon.
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