Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded

by Samuel Richardson

Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, published in 1740, grew out of a commission Samuel Richardson had received to write a book of model letters, and it is told entirely in letters and journal entries. Pamela Andrews, a fifteen-year-old maidservant, writes to her parents after the death of her mistress, whose son Mr. B. begins to pursue her with gifts, then threats, then abduction to his Lincolnshire estate, where she is held under the eye of the housekeeper Mrs. Jewkes. Her resistance and her minute record of her own feelings wear her persecutor down into a suitor. The book was the success of its decade, imitated and parodied at once, and it moved English fiction toward the study of character. The full text is available to read online in your browser on Vinteuil, and the first chapter is free.