Chapter 8 focuses on a uniquely descriptive scene in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1749) where the heroine is depicted under arrest, kneeling in silent prayer, with her finger enclosed in a Bible to mark where she had been reading. This chapter also briefly discusses book scenes in Richardson’s Pamela (1740), where the heroine is compared to the Book of Common Prayer. This chapter shows how Richardson uses the authority associated with devotional reading to hallow our imaginative, psychological descent into his fictional characters.

While French literary history usually presumes a firm tradition of the epistolary novel running from Lettres portuguaises in 1669 to the end of the following century, this chapter demonstrates that the form's rise was protracted, and proceeded in two stages. A first, modest popularity was achieved by novels of satirical observation. Formally, these epistolary novels were distinct from the much more successful epistolary novels that followed, which featured a polyphonic exchange of correspondence. Viewed formally, the history of the epistolary novel in France is largely discontinuous, though the polyphonic variant's own development displays the same isomorphism visible in other novelistic artifacts examined in this book.

Chapter 1 demonstrates that Richardson’s private and public readers participated in the authorship of and influenced the revisions to his novels.His first novel, Pamela (1740), is perhaps the most notorious object of eighteenth-century revision, given Richardson’s lengthy interactions with his readers and his concern about their responses.Richardson was goaded into writing a sequel to Pamela that was ironically indebted to the “fan fiction” he sought to disparage, in particular John Kelly’s Pamela’s Conduct in High Life (1741).His second novel, Clarissa (1747–48), was composed in consultation with his literary network, as he unhesitatingly added material to remove the nuance from Lovelace’s villainous character and incorporated sexually implicit material into the third edition.For his third novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), Richardson solicited letters from his friends in an attempt to create a fully collaborative final volume.Although only one of his correspondents attempted a letter, Richardson’s requests for and responses to model letters from his literary circle anticipate a type of social authorship that reached its fullest potential decades later.