All you need to know about the books you meant to read

This week: Samuel Richardson's Clarissa By Gavin Griffiths

Plot: Clarissa is first presented as an intelligent girl of pristine virtue born into a family of mean-spirited money-grubbers. She is courted by Lovelace, a dashing rake, raw libido in a periwig. But to help the family finances, her parents decide she must marry Solmes, a rich, repellent creep. Lovelace fools Clarissa into believing he is her saviour. He kidnaps her, and she is held "under restraint''. Lovelace repeatedly tries to seduce her, sensing her chastity is as fragile as bone china. Again and again, she repulses him, though other bits of her complicated emotional network seem to signal quite the opposite. Finally, Lovelace, in a lather of frustration, drugs Clarissa with the help of some female assistants (interesting detail, that) and rapes her. With Clarissa's loss of chastity comes a gradual loss of reason, identity and eventually, life. Lovelace, stifled with remorse, casually throws himself into a duel and is killed.

Theme: The book explores both sexual harassment - although that's rather a gentle word for Clarissa's predicament - and what it is to be trapped in gender stereotypes. It couldn't be more politically correct in theme, if not in conclusion. Clarissa is powerless because she is a woman in a society where men have the cash, the land and the authority. She is a victim because she has sexual desires but has been told by family, church and state that those desires either don't count or don't exist. Lovelace is powerless because he is trapped by the idea of being a rake - he rapes Clarissa because he wants to destroy all opposition to his will. But in raping her, he defiles and destroys himself.

Clarissa's is a world where Christian, family values are a theoretical standard that don't impinge on the reality of commercial and sexual exploitation but are instead used to prop up the status quo. Familiar, eh?

Style: The entire novel is written in letters, mostly from Clarissa and Lovelace to their respective confidants, Anna Howe and Belford. This enables Richardson to immerse himself in stylistic personalities: Anna Howe's letters are controlled, using the vocabulary of 18th century piety. Clarissa's mingle sententious moralising with a jagged edge; Lovelace's anticipate the romantic movement as his racy syntax barely catches up with itself - he writes in hormones rather than ink.

What they thought of it then: It hit Europe like the plague. Ladies swooned over Lovelace, gents panted over our heroine. Dr Johnson wept buckets and thought nobody had as fine an understanding of the human heart as Richardson. Fielding, however, found it an elephantine exercise in voyeuristic soft porn.

What we think of it now: Much admired, partly because it provides a rich mine for all the most modish trends in academe. Because you can never say to what extent Richardson controls the novel, the structuralists love it. Feminist critics can have a ball, as can Marxists since the novel centres on property rights. New historicists can bang on about the Anti- christ in 18th Century puritan pamphlets to their heart's content.

Responsible for: Jane Austen's wicked seducers, Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and in some respects, the whole genre of the English novel.