“Clarissa and Her Readers…for The Clarissa Project should prove quite valuable for students and scholars. Carol Houlihan Flynn’s lovely introduction justifies the collection’s title, analyzing the often adversarial relationship of Richardson’s readers to his massive novel, and reflecting upon what she calls the critic’s ‘conflicting impulse to expose and admire’ the cultural and aesthetic work Richardson does in Clarissa …. Flynn argues compellingly that Richardson at once reveals and disguises the political and economic ‘structure of things,’ remaining loyal to ‘the system he threatens, through his examples, to subvert’…. Overall the collection manages to retain a tight focus while offering a wide range of questions and approaches. The recent textual scholarship, and the new availability of an index and Richardson’s own additions to his text, will surely provoke further work of this quality.”

— Leslie Richardson, Eighteenth-Century Studies