In Volume I, Letters 9-11 introduced a very specific back-and-forth between Clarissa and Anna about the ways they would write each other when they write about Clarissa’s feelings for Lovelace. Keri, responding to Letter 9, found the “author-reader relationship quite interesting and the ways in which Clarissa works through her own thoughts and feelings about Lovelace through her writing.” This letter, Keri suggested, also contains “a lot of moments where the writing seems more for Clarissa herself than to Miss Howe. Several places contain punctuation such as dashes or several exclamation marks, which, in context, suggest the immediacy of the letter-writing that mimics the style of personal diary or journal more than a letter to a friend. . . . Some thing as seemingly insignificant as the punctuation here shows that Clarissa is, in fact, working through her own emotions and feelings about these gentlemen while writing to Anna. In addition, the back-and-forth nature of Clarissa’s request demonstrates the immediacy with which Clarissa writes, and there are moments within this letter and in others where Clarissa goes for quite a while without directing the content to the reader at all.”

In Letter 10, we examined again how writers attempt to shape reader response. As Meghan noted, Anna here imagines a “kind of hypothetical dialogue between Anna and Clarissa. Though they aren’t talking to each other in the same room, Anna and Clarissa can still take into account the other person’s hypothetical reaction and can then plan their writerly moves accordingly.” Keri agreed, noting that “there are several moments in these letters where the writer, after introducing a specific topic, then tells the reader how to respond to it. It seems that these characters, like Richardson, are constantly try to exercise control over the content of their writing. I don’t really know what to think about this notion of depriving reader agency yet, but I do think that it is interesting.” Anna also suggests to Clarissa that she may feel a certain “throb” or “glow” when she thinks of Lovelace, an idea Clarissa very firmly denies in Letter 11. Nevertheless, the terms persist through several letters.