I gave way to her angry struggle; but, absolutely overcome by so charming a display of innocent confusion, I caught hold of her hand as she was flying from me, and kneeling at her fee, O my angel, said I, (quite destitute of reserve, and hardly knowing the tenor of my own speech; and had a parson been there, I had certainly been a gone man,) receive the vows of your faithful Lovelace. Make him yours, and only yours, for ever. This will answer every end. Who will dare to form plots and stratagems against my wife? That you are not so is the ground of all their foolish attempts, and of their insolent hopes in Solmes’s favour.—O be mine!—I beseech you (thus on my knee I beseech you) to be mine. We shall then have all the world with us. And every body will applaud an event that every body expects.

Was the devil in me! I no more intended all this ecstatic nonsense, than I thought the same moment of flying in the air! All power is with this charming creature. It is I, not she, at this rate, that must fail in the arduous trial.

Didst thou ever before hear of a man uttering solemn things by an involuntary impulse, in defiance of premeditation, and of all his proud schemes? (Letter 138, Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 492)

In this passage, addressed to Belford, Lovelace writes trying to understand what he has just done. Overcome by Clarissa’s sadness and “quite destitute of reserve,” he presses her to marry him right now. Lovelace has no idea himself how to make sense of this: “I no more intended all this ecstatic nonsense, than I thought the same moment of flying in the air!”

When Clarissa writes to question Anna, she is usually seeking her endorsement of actions. (Did I do the right thing? Don’t tell me if I didn’t. Okay tell me.) Lovelace’s question, here at least, is quite different. (How can I square these feelings with the person I am—or think I am?) It seems that Lovelace confronts a narrative of the self (a man who has genuine feelings of sympathy and love for a woman) at odds with the self he sees himself as performing (the rake, the libertine, the wit). Here Lovelace appears to break out of his typical rhetorical flourish, to ask Belford to help him understand his actions.

Belford answers. “Upon the whole matter let me wish thee to consider well what thou art about, before thou goest a step farther in the path which thou hast chalked out for thyself to tread, and art just going to enter into” (Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 503).

By the time Lovelace writes again, his feelings have gone on another roller-coaster—tricking her, then proposing again on seeing her great distress after her father’s curse, then back to tricking her again. He refutes Belford’s points (but for whom?), then tells him “But I am not angry with thee, Jack. I love opposition. As gold is tried by fire and virtue by temptation: so is sterling, so is sterling wit by opposition” (Letter 152, Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 519).

When Lovelace writes, he performs. His letters are witty and clever and organized to effect. He writes to Belford, not answer his criticisms, but to blow them away. At some level Lovelace must understand what Belford is telling him. But he is so wedded to his idea of plans and schemes that he will not—or cannot—stop. For Lovelace, writing is a way of performing an identity. That it is a performance is shown by the bravado rhetoric and the constant shifting of personae. Clarissa writes to reveal her self. Lovelace writes to invent a self. What is disconcerting for him are moments, such as this, when the invented and performing self seems at odd with some other self, one not accessible to his wit or egotism.

Lovelace loves to write. He loves narrative letters. He writes all the time. One might even say he is as obsessed with writing as he is with Clarissa herself. Reading Clarissa, I have come to believe that Lovelace illustrates the canon of invention. These inventions—manifested in trick, letter, and identity—are a fount of pleasure. There is never any test Clarissa would fail; she will never succumb to his tricks. The only way he can win her is to change the rules. In a weird way, she is his muse.

Peter Brooks (1992) wrote about “narrative desire,” which in Brooks’s view, is comparable to (male) sexual arousal. In a really compelling novel, we want to read and read, more and more, moving ever closer (but not too quickly) toward the ending. We don’t really want to get to the end, but we must know that there is an ending. Arousal by itself, without the promise of climax, will not yield the same kind of pleasure.

I think Lovelace is driven by narrative desire. He wants to read and write, more and more. He can’t help speeding up the pace. But at the same time, he loves the delay (it is just that much more arousing). Writing the letters and (and enacting the narrative tricks on Clarissa) creates immense desire. I think that is why he sometimes seems literally unable to stop writing. Similarly, Richardson’s readers want more and more. This was not an audience for whom brevity was a virtue but, eventually, there needs to be the satisfaction of an ending. Whether that ending does, indeed, fulfill narrative desire is a question many of the novel’s readers have pondered.