Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded (Oxford Worlds Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Cleverness rewarded
Review: You cannot put just one star to such an important novel in English Literature. I find it fascinating and it is not boring. I tend to think that Pamela is a cunning little lady who knew her chances in life and took the only way towards a higher social level. She is not really a hipocritical woman, she believes in her virtue and at the same time takes pleasure in describing rich clothes and how bravely she acts in front of Evil. From that point of view it is a magnificent study of how to fight against overwhelming odds and win. Forget all those words about "virtue" and think about "cleverness" instead, and the novel will be worth while.

Rating:
Summary: An important novel *and* a pleasurable read!!
Review: _Pamela_ should be noted for more than its epistolarity. As Margaret Doody remarks in her recent introduction to different edition of Richardson's novel, _Pamela_ makes a lower-class female character the center of a romance. Through the young serving maid Pamela, Richardson introduces readers to the realism and psychological detail he goes on to develop and refine in _Clarissa_, as well as later novels. While this reader would hesitate to hold up Pamela as a radical or revolutionary figure for the above reasons, which is what Doody does in her reading of the novel, she certainly would not dismiss the novel or its heroine as quickly and completely as did the previous reviewer. Instead, this reader would suggest that other readeres see the repetitive nature of Pamela's style, her apparent vanity, and the moments of seemingly unintended comedy (as well as the deliberate moments of humor Richardson carefully does include) as features of the novel that mark the difficulty Ri! chardson might have had concocting this first novel and imagining a voice and style for its heroine. Pay attention to what Richardson _tries_ to do, as well as where and why he might seem to fail. Compare this novel to others that you've read from the eighteenth century and earlier. See the difference, even development, between _Pamela_ and _Robinson Crusoe_. Note the striking similarities between _Pamela_ and _Roxana_. Consider the ways in which Pamela and her many voices come from the hand of a master printer comissioned not to write a novel, but a guide to letter-writing. And note: the 1740 version of this novel looks a lot different from later versions that Richardson refined, changing Pamela's phrasing, as well as details like words in italics and the use of dashes. The result is two somewhat different _Pamela_s. Read the latter as Richardson's response to the barage of anti-Pamela writing that hit the presses almost immediately after his own novel first appeared in print! .