Pamela

An epistolary novel telling the story of a beautiful 15-year-old maidservant named Pamela Andrews, whose country landowner master, Mr. B, makes unwanted and inappropriate advances towards her after the death of his mother. After Mr. B attempts unsuccessfully to seduce and rape her multiple times, he eventually rewards her virtue when he sincerely proposes an equitable marriage to her. Pamela, who is emotionally fragile and confused by Mr. B's manipulation, accepts his proposal. In the novel's second part, Pamela marries Mr. B and tries to acclimatize to upper-class society.

An epistolary novel telling the story of a beautiful 15-year-old maidservant named Pamela Andrews, whose country landowner master, Mr. B, makes unwanted and inappropriate advances towards her after the death of his mother. After Mr. B attempts unsuccessfully to seduce and rape her multiple times, he eventually rewards her virtue when he sincerely proposes an equitable marriage to her. Pamela, who is emotionally fragile and confused by Mr. B's manipulation, accepts his proposal. In the novel's second part, Pamela marries Mr. B and tries to acclimatize to upper-class society.

One of the most spectacular successes of the flourishing literary marketplace of eighteenth-century London, Pamela also marked a defining moment in the emergence of the modern novel. In the words of one contemporary, it divided the world "into two different Parties, Pamelists and Anti-pamelists," even eclipsing the sensational factional politics of the day. Preached for its morality, and denounced as pornography in disguise, it vividly describes a young servant's long resistance to the attempts of her predatory master to seduce her. Written in the voice of its low-born heroine, Pamela is not only a work of pioneering psychological complexity, but also a compelling and provocative study of power and its abuse.