The novel

     The credit for having written the first English novel of character, or "psychological novel," is almost unanimously given to Samuel Richardson for his Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). Pamela is the story of a sentimental but shrewd young woman who, by prudently safeguarding her beleaguered chastity, succeeds in becoming the wife of a wild young gentleman instead of his debauched servant girl. The distinction between the novel of incident and the novel of character cannot be drawn sharply; but in the novel of incident the greater interest is in what the protagonist will do next and on how the story will turn out; in the novel of character, it is on the protagonist's motives for what he or she does, and on how the protagonist as a person will turn out. On twentieth-century developments in the novel of character see Leon Edel, The Modem Psychological Novel (rev., 1965).

     Pamela, like its greater and tragic successor, Richardson's Clarissa (1747-48), is an epistolary novel; that is, the narrative is conveyed entirely by an exchange of letters. Later novelists have preferred alternative devices for limiting the narrative point of view to one or another single character, but the epistolary technique is still occasionally revived—for example, in Mark Harris' hilarious novel Wake Up, Stupid (1959) and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982). See Linda Kauffman, Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (1992)

-Abrams, M. H. (1999). A glossary of literary terms (7th ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

To download  Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson, click here.

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To download A Glossary of Literary Terms by M. H. Abrams, click here.