In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

604 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:4 his Collection might be seriously confused by contradictory or at least contrasting sections? The varied tenor of the Collection, while moving it in the direction of literature and enabling modest praise for it from its editors, would have enfeebled it as a work of practical moral guidance for his contemporary audience. Like some of the other projects—large and small—featured in this set of volumes, the ends and means of the Collection are open to question, which makes me a little uneasy with the tendency of the Clarissa Project editors (Keymer apart) to create apologiae for what are, in fact, some of Richardson's more dubious enterprises . Nevertheless, I am also much humbled by the hard work, erudition, and enthusiasm of all the contributors to these volumes, and I am sure that other readers will join me in gratitude for having these elusive documents made available in an authentic format. Lois A. Chaber American Intercontinental University in London Samuel Richardson. Histoire de Clarisse Harlove. Trans, l'abbé Prévost. Ed. with notes by Shelly Charles. 2 vols, 883, and 787 pp. Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, 1999. FFr390. ISBN 2-84321-017-8. The first edition of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa was published in three instalments of seven volumes between December 1747 and December 1748, the last three volumes appearing just two months before Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. After 250 years, the debate about the relative merits of these two great novels continues, yet in one respect Tom Jones has been far more fortunate than its predecessor . Readers of Fielding's novel have a wealth of modern, annotated editions from which to choose, including the standard scholarly edition by Martin Battestin and Fredson Bowers, in both its original hardcover form and its corrected paperback reprint, the more recent Oxford edition by John Bender and Simon Stern, the Norton edition by Sheridan Baker, and the Penguin edition by R.P.C. Mutter, with a new Penguin by Thomas Keymer forthcoming. Clarissa, in contrast, did not receive an annotated edition until 1985, when Angus Ross's huge single-volume Penguin made the first-edition text available for the first time since its initial publication , and provided the only set of explanatory notes that the novel had ever received. In 1990, a facsimile edition of the heavily revised and expanded eightvolume third-edition text of Clarissa was published by AMS, and in 1998 three volumes of accompanying material, Samuel Richardson's Published Commentary on Clarissa, 1747-65, were published by Pickering and Chatto, but Ross's Penguin remained the only annotated edition of the novel. Shelly Charles's superb new edition of Antoine-François Prévost's translation of Clarissa is important in many ways. Like Ross's Penguin, it makes available a text that had long been out of print. Lettres anglaises, ou Histoire de Miss Clarisse Harlove (1751), almost as much an original novel as a translation, was last published in 1846, and relatively few readers have access to any edition of REVIEWS 605 this influential work. Thomas Beebee's "Clarissa" on the Continent (1990), a fine comparative study of Prévost's French and Michaelis's German translation, has made little impact on the recent wave of Clarissa studies: largely, I suspect, because neither Prévost's nor Michaelis's versions of Clarissa is well known to students ofeighteenth-century fiction. Editions Desjonquères deserve our gratitude for making Prévost's Clarissa available in a handsome, robust, and affordable twovolume edition. And Shelly Charles has performed a valuable service in editing the work with such thoroughness and care: the introduction, the copious annotations, and the ancillary material are all of exceptional quality. Although Richardson knew no French, or any language other than English, and although he never crossed the channel, Clarissa became, in Prévost's translation, a canonical work in France. In his biography of Richardson, Alan McKillop cites figures suggesting, surprisingly, that for several decades in the mid-eighteenth century, the novel most often found in private French libraries was Mme de Graffigny's Lettres d'une péruvienne, followed closely by French translations of Pamela, Tom Jones, and...

pdf

Share