[Belford to Lovelace] I broke it open accordingly, and found in it no less than eleven letters, each sealed with her own seal, and black wax, one of which was directed to me.
…
The other letters are directed to her father, to her mother, one to her two uncles, to her brother, to her sister, to her aunt Hervey, to her cousin Morden, to Miss Howe, to Mrs. Norton, and lastly one to you, in performance of her promise, that a letter should be sent you when she arrived at her father’s house!——I will withhold this last till I can be assured that you will be fitter to receive it than Tourville tells me you are at present.
Copies of all these are sealed up, and entitled, Copies of my ten posthumous letters, for J. Belford, Esq.; and put in among the bundle of papers left to my direction, which I have not yet had leisure to open.
No wonder, while able, that she was always writing, since thus only of late could she employ that time, which heretofore, from the long days she made, caused so many beautiful works to spring from her fingers. It is my opinion, that there never was a woman so young, who wrote so much, and with such celerity. Her thoughts keeping pace, as I have seen, with her pen, she hardly ever stopped or hesitated; and very seldom blotted out, or altered. It was a natural talent she was mistress of, among many other extraordinary ones. I gave the Colonel his letter, and ordered Harry instantly to get ready to carry the others. Mean time (retiring into the next apartment) we opened the will. We were both so much affected in perusing it, that at one time the Colonel, breaking off, gave it to me to read on; at another I gave it back to him to proceed with; neither of us being able to read it through without such tokens of sensibility as affected the voice of each.
I believe this is the letter that Debra mentioned in class last week, where Belford describes Clarissa as a natural writer whose thoughts and words flowed from her pen without hesitation. I wonder what Clarissa herself would say about this characterization.
(And I noticed, too, Belford's mention of “sensibility,” which we discussed last week with Dr. Ridley. There were quite a number of interruptions of letters this week due to overwhelming emotions or “sensibilities,” and Belford shows himself no exception, not immune to great feeling in this volume as well as the previous one.)
This is a very nice tribute to Clarissa as a writer. I don't know how Clarissa would feel about her ability to write being described as a “talent.” Perhaps I'm thinking too much of early Clarissa, but she seemed to think of writing ability as a reflection of self. She and Anna were so much the people who they portrayed in their letters, and she put this characterization onto others. Solmes' bad writing was a reflection of his uninteresting personality. This idea was why Clarissa believed Lovelace to be a better person. She did not believe someone who could write like he did could be bad, and even though this was proven wrong, I still don't think she would want to think of writing as a talent. It's more than that to her.
I think Clarissa's fluency and her lack if crossing or blotting out is one with her own sense that her writing is a record of (rather than a construction of) her thoughts and “self.” It's interesting to compare this with Lovelace's own fluency. Neither of them seems to have any sense of distance between thinking and writing. This, for me, is how Richardson was able to “invent” interiority in the novel–by making this equivalence.
Both comments strike me as apt. Belford's letter is a “tribute,” and of course perfectly placed by Richardson to remind us, as we exit the novel, what extraordinary writing we've been reading. I like Debra's connecting Lovelace and Clarissa in this fluency–this lack of distance between thinking and writing. (Isn't lucky Clarissa didn't live to see the age of compulsory English 101 revision . . .)