Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter-Writing

Louise Curran is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Oxford. She is co-editor (with George Justice and Devoney Looser) of Correspondence Primarily on Pamela and Clarissa (1732–1749), a forthcoming volume in The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson. As well as articles on Richardson's correspondence, she has written on Pope's Rape of the Lock and Milton's reception in eighteenth-century verse miscellanies.

• Introduction: undesigning scribbler; 1. Forming a style: Pamela, plainness and the 'true sublime'; 2. Lady Bradshaigh's Clarissa and the author as correspondent; 3. Trifling scribes: women's letters and patchwork writing; 4. The Grandison years: men, morals, and manliness; 5. Editing letters in an age of index-learning; Conclusion.

'Louise Curran's Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter-Writing is a detailed and perceptive examination of Richardson's extensive private correspondence. In this engaging study, such correspondence is invested with its long overdue critical significance … Astute and persuasive throughout, Curran's book is a striking addition to Richardson scholarship and to studies of 'the great age of letter-writing' more generally … Such an uncompromising dedication to these obscure texts has not been seen perhaps in Richardson scholarship since Thomas Keymer's seminal Richardson's 'Clarissa' and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (1992); placing Curran's book, quite deservedly, in erudite company.' Rachel Sulich, The BARS Review