Realism in Samuel Richardson and the Abbé Prévost by Robert J. Frail (review)

210 ing films, stage productions, and websites . This guide could save the struggling student (not to mention the senior scholar ) hours of research time in an enormously complex field of study. How often do we meet with someone trustworthy who says to us, ‘‘everyman, I will go along with thee, and be thy guide’’? This book is such a one. Geoffrey Sill Rutgers University ROBERT J. FRAIL. Realism in Samuel Richardson and the Abbé Prévost. Lewiston , Queenston and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2005. Pp. vi ⫹ 198. $109.95. The abbé Prévost is perhaps best known to English-speaking scholars of the eighteenth century for his translations of at least two of Samuel Richardson ’s novels: Lettres anglaises ou histoire de Miss Clarisse Harlowe (1751) and Nouvelles lettres anglaises, ou Histoire du chevalier Grandisson (1755, 1758) (it is possible that he also translated Pamela). Yet he was also a prolific novelist and essayist, and one of the key intellectual figures in the rise of the secular clergy in Enlightenment France. Mr. Frail’s study traces the diversity, as well as the literary and cultural significance , of Prévost’s career, setting chapters on his work alongside essays on the English author by whom he was most influenced, Richardson. Frequently insightful, Mr. Frail’s chapters on Richardson take welcomingly quirky perspectives. There is a fascinating chapter, for example, on the influence of the Pauline letters on Richardson ’s novels, especially Clarissa, which meditates on the scriptural significance of the novel, and compares the heroine with the four Evangelists (and her author) ‘‘as someone preoccupied with reading, revising, transcribing, collecting , recollecting, and recording.’’ Similarly, in a thought-provoking chapter on the oft-neglected figure of Colonel Morden in Clarissa, Mr. Frail suggests that the character ‘‘reflects what might be called Richardson’s teleological anxiety,’’ since both are centrally concerned with the issue of control, and ‘‘reduc[ing] the possibility of multiple readings.’’ In this chapter, as elsewhere, Mr. Frail demonstrates his fondness for illuminating analogies with contemporary culture; he describes Clarissa, for example, as ‘‘a cross between Madame de Tourvel, in Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangeureuses and Martha Stewart—a defiant heroine who cannot outmaneuver the system.’’ It is in the chapters on Prévost, however , that Mr. Frail’s enthusiasm and passion for his subject are most apparent . His enthralling account of the weekly periodical Le Pour et contre (1733 to 1740) reveals Prévost’s almost obsessive fascination with British culture . According to Mr. Frail, the abbé not only supervised its production, but wrote many of its 296 articles, especially in its earliest years. Mr. Frail gives a detailed outline of each volume, demonstrating the wide range of Prévost’s interests, including his fascination with the theater on both sides of the English Channel. An even more mammoth project was the twenty-volume Histoire générale des voyages (1746–1759), the first sixteen volumes of which were compiled by Prévost. Mr. Frail shows how the abbé expanded and played with the genre of travel literature, introducing novelistic devices, and indulging his enduring fascination for the fantastic, 211 the extraordinary, even the monstrous. Throughout Mr. Frail’s study, Prévost emerges as a ‘‘mercurial’’ outsider to the mainstream Enlightenment. The book is divided into chapters on Richardson and Prévost. Aside from one essay on the abbé’s translation of Grandison , which successfully defends him from the charge of ill-considered pruning , the two authors are mostly treated separately. Their juxtaposition does throw up interesting parallels, but it is left to the reader to make the connections . There is little attempt, for example , to follow up the claim that their fiction ‘‘is linked to the representation of reality in deeper and more penetrating ways than any other authors from the early part of the eighteenth century.’’ Neither is the Preface’s assertion that ‘‘what links Richardson and Prévost together more than anything else is the way they practiced alchemy with language and became goldsmiths of the word’’ substantiated by any kind of comparative linguistic, or stylistic, analysis . Instead each chapter reads like a self-contained conference paper (as the Acknowledgements reveal, some of them initially were). This...