“Labouring in Suspense”: Paying Attention to Providence in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa

Abstract

This article examines the connection between suspense, providential anxiety, and the types of reading practices that are both represented in and required by Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48). While some scholars point out that suspense and providence produce similar states of anxious pas sivity in readers, I argue that Richardson’s techniques for managing sus pense encourage the active—if provisional—interpretation of events still in progress, a process I term “attentive reading.” Not all suspense trains readers in attention, as Lovelace’s manipulative schemes make clear. However, Richardson’s epistolary technique of “writing to the moment,” taken alongside the novel’s editorial apparatus of prefaces, footnotes, and post scripts, simultaneously intensifies readers’ experience of suspense and offers the tools for developing provisional judgments within it. I conclude by reading Clarissa’s “father’s house” letter, and its gradual interpretation by other characters, as a model for the kind of attentive reading that the novel as a whole demands.