Lettere su Clarissa. Scrittura privata e romanzo nell'"Epistolario" di Samuel Richardson (review)

This book is the first selection of Samuel Richardson's Letters to be published in Italian and comes at a moment when renewed Italian interest in Clarissa and Pamela, novels well known in translation since the eighteenth century, is being demonstrated by the appearance of monographs on one or the other every two or three years over the last three decades. This is not so, however, with Richardson's many letters, only two of which had been published previously (to Lady Elchin, 22 September 1755, and to Mrs Donellan, 22 February 1752) in an anthology of translations of British eighteenth-century theories about the novel.

Donatella Montini presents a group of 31 letters drawn partly from Anna Laetitia Barbauld's Samuel Richardson's Correspondence (London: Richard Phillips, 1804) and partly from John Carroll's Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), which she has checked in some cases against the manuscripts at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and translated into Italian in a carefully annotated edition. As stated in the title, these are letters chosen from the many discussing Clarissa over the period 1744-57, some sent by Richardson while com posing the first parts of the first edition and others in the following years while working on the other parts and on the second and third editions. This group includes all the most important letters concerning the problems he addressed and solved while engaged in "making a new Species of Writing," as he put it in a well-known phrase repeated in two of the letters found here.

Montini also presents a few other relevant items, such as the eulogy on correspondence (to Sophia Westcomb, 1746), the biographical letter containing information about his father, his own relationship to letter writing and what occasioned his writing of Pamela (to Johannes Stinstra, 2 June 1753), and the letter on his everyday life as an old man, feeling slighted by young ladies with totally different hours from his for sleep and conversation (to Hester Mulso, 15 August 1755). Finally, there is the letter of 19 November 1757 to Lady Bradshaigh, where he speaks of having bound copies of their correspondence and hints at the possibility of publishing them.

Translating what she describes as "this often convoluted and jerky non-fictional prose, so focused on itself as to suggest that the writer is addressing himself first and foremost" must have been hard for Montini, not least because of her decision to "maintain the long sentence construction and discursive emphasis" while at the same time "taking decisions so as to aid the modern reader and domesticating the text above all as regards punctuation marks" (52). The overall result is a success despite some occasional slips, which are, however, inevitable in all translations. What is involved in this case is not so much content as lexical accuracy. Examples include the translation of "Early Risers" as mattutine instead of mattiniere (83), "Regret" as rimpianto instead of rammarico ("yet Seven Volumes are, to my Regret, made of it," [75]), and "Diffidence of one's own Abilities" as "timidezza nei confronti delle proprie abilità" instead of "insicurezza nei confronti delle proprie capacità (95).

Montini's accompanying notes constitute a very good guide for the scholarly reader, containing information on the correspondents, the debate on epistolary writing, narrative tempo, and other works by Richardson or by the other authors mentioned.

The 48 pages of Montini's introduction, which tackle a whole series of questions regarding the nature of the familiar letter and what it meant for Richardson, constitute a fine piece of scholarship. She begins by discussing the meaning and aspects of the epistolary "contract" and its eighteenth-century relation to conversation, quoting also from letters not present in this selection, and then expands on the great increase in letter writing during the eighteenth century with a whole variety of aims and contents, from philosophical letters...