My first weekend without Emerson and I must say I felt, if not distraught, at least as though something were missing. I had decided last week that I would return to reading Clarissa and when the time came to sit down with the book I almost couldn’t do it. But I did.

My goal was to read fifty pages but I had forgotten how large the page and how tiny the print and got through just over thirty pages (p 1090 – 1123). That really is enough at one sitting, the sorrow and misery of Clarissa being too much to bear for more than that. I’m not certain how to write about this book, it is so very long and I am only reading small sections at a time. Perhaps just notes and impressions? Well, we’ll see how it goes.

I am now in possession of a marvelous word: fribble. Mr. Lovelace says of the nervous Mr. Hickman, who has been charged by Miss Howe (Clarissa’s best friend) to whom Hickman is engaged, to visit Lovelace in order to get the record straight, that he “fribbled with is waistcoat buttons.” My New Oxford American Dictionary tells me that “fribble” as a verb means to “part with lightly and wastefully; fritter.” It can also be a noun describing a frivolous or foolish person. The word’s origin is mid 17th century (Clarissa appeared in 1747) and came from an earlier verb that meant stammer as well as to act aimlessly. I can’t wait to use this one in a conversation!

I’ve liked Miss Howe from the beginning of the book not least because she has sass. And now she dares to write a well-intentioned letter to Clarissa’s sister to tell her that Clarissa is gravely ill because she thought she’d like to know. She gets a mean response from Arabella which prompts her to send a pert reply. Arabella ups the game with a bitchy letter back which is trumped by Miss Howe’s catty return:

Yet I was willing to give you part of my mind–call for more of it; it shall be at your service: from one who, though she thanks God she is not your sister, is not your enemy: but that she is not the latter is withheld but by two considerations; one, that you bear, though unworthily, a relation to a sister so excellent; the other, that you are not of consequence enough to engage anything but the pity and contempt of A[nna]. H[owe].

Meow! Arabella has no response except to show the letters to her mother who then sends copies to Mrs. Howe to let her know what “strange freedoms” her daughter has taken and respectfully request Anna be made to cease and desist. Mrs. Howe is then forced to write Mrs. Harlowe a letter of apology.

I suspect in the case of Anna Howe the apple didn’t fall far from the tree and for all of Mrs. Howe’s fussing about propriety and her attempts to force her daughter into conforming, she’d love to give the Harlowes the what-for.

Next week I think I might mention how brave I think Clarissa is. Or letter writing. Or maybe the dastardly Lovelace.