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One reaches the end of Clarissa not so much with a feeling of accomplishment as with a feeling of total exhaustion. Like Frodo finally reaching Mount Doom, you sink back, scarred, your face smeared with ash, murmuring ‘It's done’ as the book falls from your hands, surrounded by gouts of lava and wondering if you'll ever know home or happiness again.

It is very difficult to sum up a book the size of Clarissa. Its length is so overwhelming that its difference from other novels starts to seem not so much a matter of degree, as a kind of category error. There's a real sense in which Clarissa is not a novel at all, but some other thing. I joked when I finished it about turning back to the first page and starting again; but actually, there are few books where this would work better, because who the hell can remember what happened way back then? The last time I read that bit was eleven months ago!

For such a huge novel, the plot is very simple. As summarised on the back cover: ‘Clarissa, in resisting parental pressure to marry a loathsome man for his money, falls prey to Lovelace, is raped and dies’. The action falls roughly into three 500-page phases. In the first, Clarissa is trapped in her family home, dealing with her tyrannical relations and doing her best to resist marrying this guy they've got earmarked for her. In the second phase, having run away with Lovelace, she is trapped in a brothel in London, trying to resist his advances and escape. And in the third, now on her own, she gradually wastes away and dies as Lovelace comes to terms with what has happened.

Each of these phases is drawn out a little too long for modern tastes – for my taste, anyway – but this is not because these sections are emotionally unconvincing, but, on the contrary, because they are so emotionally powerful. The second section in particular I found almost unbearably oppressive – reading endless descriptions of Clarissa's attempts to get away from her prison, and knowing that I had only eight hundred pages of failure, gaslighting and sexual assault to look forward to, was grim. It is surely a hard read for anyone with personal experience of these issues to take on.

The moments of transition between these phases – when she first runs away with Lovelace, and later when she finally escapes from him – are genuinely exciting. In these linking sections, when a few scraps of action briefly intrude on the narrative, the book really comes alive. For all of these reasons, it's one of the few novels where I can imagine an abridged version would work really well.

The single dominating incident of the book, occurring about halfway through, is Lovelace's drugging and rape of Clarissa. This act is never described directly, although everything circles around it: it's the black hole at the heart of the novel, warping everything that comes before and after. It's worth considering this rape in some detail, because it's here I think that Richardson interacts most revealingly with contemporary assumptions, and it helps explain why the book cast such a shadow over the rest of eighteenth-century literature.

It's notable that Lovelace has to drug Clarissa first, and have her held down by his accomplices, because without such details Richardson would hardly have been able to generate a sense of outrage at all. One of the first things Clarissa's friends and family want to know, after it all comes to light, is whether there was ‘anything uncommon or barbarous in the seduction’ (as her best friend puts it) – because otherwise, who cares? A lot of sex at the time was, as literature makes uncomfortably clear, extremely close to rape anyway. This is especially obvious in French novels, like Crébillon fils's Le Sopha, but it's also there in the more sentimental and bourgeois literature of England: outside of marriage, there were simply no conventions under which a woman could agree to a sexual encounter and still keep her ‘honour’. To remain respectable, she required coercion.

Although couples who were into each other must, in practice, have found plenty of ways to signal such things, in a formal sense consensual sex was left looking not very different from unconsensual. ‘It is a maxim with some,’ Lovelace breezes, ‘that if they are left alone with a woman, and make not an attempt upon her, she will think herself affronted.’ So although he does not at first plan to force Clarissa with violence, he also doesn't expect her to be a willing participant.

…for what, thinkest thou, have I taken all the pains I have taken, and engaged so many persons in my cause, but to avoid the necessity of violent compulsion? But yet, imaginest thou that I expect direct consent from such a lover of forms as this lady is known to be?

The italicisation of ‘direct consent’ shows what a ludicrous concept it is to him. Instead, his ‘main hope is but in a yielding reluctance,’ he says, without which ‘whatever rapes have been attempted, none ever were committed, one person to one person’. What he's saying there, in case the language is unclear, is that every so-called ‘rape’ really ends with the woman giving in and going along with it. ‘There may be consent in struggle; there may be yielding in resistance,’ he says later; ‘even her own sex will suspect a yielding in resistance,’ he predicts. Of course, Lovelace is intended to be a despicable villain, but nevertheless the assumptions behind his villainy say a lot of uncomfortable things about the book's social context.

The fact that Clarissa doesn't reluctantly yield, and that Lovelace does have to resort to ‘violent compulsion’, is one of the things intended to illustrate the heroine's status as a paragon of idealised womanhood. She, no less than the other characters, understands rape as being awful not (as we might see it) because of the physical violence or breach of bodily autonomy, but rather because of the transgression of that nebulous quality, her honour. The sexual act in itself is a trivial detail – the ‘most transitory evil; and which a mere church-form makes none’, as Lovelace dismisses it. Rape was, after all, basically a crime of property – and since her family have given her up, Lovelace wonders,

whose property, I pray thee, shall I invade, if I pursue my schemes of love and vengeance?—Have not those who have a right in her, renounced that right?

From this point of view, what has actually happened hardly matters compared to what people will assume has happened.  As early as her first elopement, Clarissa realises: ‘I cannot leave him with reputation to myself’; and afterwards, Lovelace assumes (wrongly, it turns out) that the dishonour of what has happened will prevent her from ever broadcasting it.

Nothing but the law stands in our way, upon that account; and the opinion of what a modest woman will suffer, rather than become a viva voce accuser, lessens much an honest fellow's apprehensions on that score.

Her sense of being wounded morally, and almost spiritually, perhaps helps to explain Clarissa's slow death in the last third of the novel, which from a purely medical point of view is otherwise totally baffling. In effect, she dies from offended sensibility. This is meant to be inspiring, but for a modern reader, it's hard to sympathise with her insipidly forgiving attitude, in which she positively welcomes her own suffering in a sort of ecstasy of religious masochism. ‘Most happy has been to me my punishment here!—happy indeed!’ she gushes, amid a profusion of Biblical quotations. Her convert and admirer Belford talks admiringly of her ‘religious rectitude…which has taught her rather to choose to be a sufferer than an aggressor’. Rebecca West has deconstructed this attitude at length in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; I think we know enough now to be suspicious of its moral value.

Instead, it is to Clarissa's bestie Anna Howe that we must look for some traces of common sense. She is pleasingly unforgiving of what has happened to Clarissa, and consistently connects it with the prevailing conditions of sexual inequality in society at large. ‘Well do your sex contrive to bring us up fools and idiots in order to make us bear the yoke you lay upon our shoulders,’ she writes to Belford (anticipating almost word-for-word arguments that Mary Wollstonecraft would make some fifty years later). Her rant about never wanting to get married is a joy:

But there must be bear and forbear, methinks some wise body will tell me: but why must I be teazed into a state where that must be necessarily the case; when now I can do as I please, and wish only to be let alone to do as best pleases me? And what, in effect, does my mother say? ‘Anna Howe, you now do everything that pleases you: now you have nobody to control you: you go and you come; you dress and you undress; you rise and you go to rest; just as you think best: but you must be happier still, child!—’

As how, madam?

‘Why, you must marry, my dear, and have none of these options; but in everything do as your husband commands you.’

This is very hard, you will own, sir, for such a one as me to think of.

We are supposed to like Anna, but we are also supposed to see that she has flaws, and this opposition to a decent marriage is, I think, intended to be one of those flaws – one that's eventually overcome. Her presence here – feisty, but eventually finding happiness in wedlock – points the way forward for fiction: if you rewrite the book from Anna Howe's perspective, you get a Jane Austen novel. By Austen's time, the kind of things that happened to Clarissa had to be palmed away on to background characters like Lydia Bennet.

When Clarissa came out, the whole concept of women's sexuality was going through a huge shift: women went from being thought of as essentially lubricious and sexually voracious (as had been the prevalent idea in the Middle Ages), to being thought of as vulnerable guardians of delicacy and honour. (‘Purity of manners,’ Clarissa says, ‘ought to be the distinguishing characteristic of our sex.’) The change was motivated in part by a desire to protect women from male predation, but it came at a cost, and the cost was denying that they had any sexuality at all. All these trends are crystallised really strongly in Richardson, and they show up especially sharply when you compare him to contemporaries like Fielding or Smollett.

These things certainly seem to offer plenty of reasons to recommend reading the novel, and it's a bit strange for me to find myself writing so much (and I could keep going for twice as long – though don't worry, I won't) about a book when I found the actual experience of it, at the time, to be so often gruelling or tedious. But it may just be the case that reading about Clarissa is, in the end, a lot more interesting than reading about Clarissa.