Unbalanced Vision

The first thing a reader notices about Clarissa is its ghastly length--1499 pages. It would just be OK if the book merely functions as a physical object, say, maybe a paperweight or a footstool. Yet once you open Samuel Richardson's "masterpiece", its boringness leaps out from the pages and haunts you; might be even worse than opening Pandora's box. I have tried to read it, skim through it, and jump pages, but the lengthy epistles exchanged between two of the most insipid females in the literary world does not appeal to me. Through the course of her story, Clarissa is raped, she dies, the end.