Although there was not really much about writing (that wasn’t moreso about narrative) in Volume IX, there was an important mention in Letter 486, about Clarissa’s writing. According to Belford, “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…” We have seen this throughout the novel, and Debra suggested that it may have stemmed from “her own sense that her writing is a record of (rather than a construction of) her thoughts and ‘self.’” She also further noted that this lack of distance between the self and writing is similar to Lovelace’s relationship with the act of writing: “Neither of them seems to have any sense of distance between thinking and writing.”

Therefore, it was no surprise that, when we read Clarissa’s will in Letter 507, we saw the document of her will as an expression or representation of Clarissa’s agency (which, as Kendra noted, we had discussed many times before); her will says all the things that she needed to say in death (even if she couldn’t say those things in life). Meghan noted that Clarissa included a clause of rebuke for Lovelace if he demanded to see her body, seeming to use her will as a form of communicating her disdain and shame at his actions, and Keri suggested that her will was yet another place where Clarissa attempted to “write” her story, to have control over it: “Clarissa’s offering of the letters to Anna helps her to fulfill one of her wishes that she mentioned so early in the novel—that Anna know her ‘whole mind.’” Now that Anna possesses her own copy of all the letters written between Anna and Clarissa, and between Clarissa and the other parties mentioned above, Anna can have a fuller, more complete understanding of Clarissa’s mind and her story as a whole.