Samuel Richardson’s
Clarissa:
An Index

“That a novel should require an index to direct scholars through its mazes seems a dubious distinction, but the longest novel in the English language must of necessity be a prime candidate for such an honor.... Susan Price Karpuk has undertaken the enormous labor of sifting through Clarissa to compile an inventory of its contents. …An Index offers indices of characters, subjects, and place names, as well as a brief synopsis of each letter, identified by its date and its number in Angus Ross’s Penguin edition of 1985. Karpuk’s index hews to Richardson’s first edition as made accessible by Ross, but with the letter summaries she provides corresponding volume and letter numbers for the 1747-8 seven-volume first edition and the eight-volume third edition of 1751. The work is meticulous, well-organized, and (if one can thus characterize an index) enthusiastic.... The index of characters claims to cover every character mentioned in the book.... An alphabetical listing of characters preceding the index points us in the proper direction if we are uncertain who qualifies as whose dependent. The subject index is equally exhaustive…. The letter summaries, though terse, provide a guide to the novel for which the faint-hearted re-reader may breathe a sigh of relief.”

—Angus Ross, Eighteenth-Century Fiction