Pamela
Pamela
Author: Samuel Richardson
Desc: One of the most spectacular successes of the flourishing literary marketplace of eighteenth-century London Pamela also marked a defining moment in the emergence of the modern novel. In the words of one contemporary it divided the world "into two different Parties Pamelists and Anti-pamelists " even eclipsing the sensational factional politics of the day. Preached for its morality and denounced as pornography in disguise it vividly describes a young servant's long resistance to the attempts of her predatory master to seduce her. Written in the voice of its low-born heroine Pamela is not only a work of pioneering psychological complexity but also a compelling and provocative study of power and its abuse. Based on the original text of 1740 from which Richardson later retreated in a series of defensive revisions this edition makes available the version of Pamela that aroused such widespread controversy on its first appearance.