ABSTRACT
Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), a text integral to the development of the English novel, famously tells the story of a young servant girl’s struggle to preserve her virtue in the face of her aristocratic master’s sexual advances, and it does so through the heroine’s letters. Pamela’s situation becomes increasingly desperate as she is held captive on a remote estate, closely monitored and cut off from the outer world, but when her master finds the letters she has defiantly continued to write to her parents the narrative takes a sudden turn. Her “moving Journal,” expressed in “so sweet, so innocent a manner,” leads the nobleman to recognize that he loves her “with a purer flame than ever [he] knew in [his] whole life” (303, 285, 301). Reformed by her morality and modesty, “not now so much the admirer of [her] beauty . . . as of [her] virtue,” Mr. B. marries Pamela, raising her to the rank of a lady (372).
