Part of what makes a book easy to read is that the characters are interesting and at least the main character has some sort of psychological depth. For me the story is almost always secondary to how the characters tackle their problems; failure and success don’t matter here. I don’t claim to have any deep insight into the female mind or women’s psychology but I can say one thing for certain; Samuel Richardson didn’t either. I did not believe for a second that this Pamela could exist as a real person (then or today). After about thirty pages I could tell that Pamela was sculpted to be the most prim and propper female roll model of his time. She had virtue, beauty, didn’t sleep around, considered refusing expensive gifts because of the context that they had been given, spoke out (above her station) at social injustice, and even at one time chose poverty for herself and family rather than being subject to a work environment that could dirty her reputation. Maybe it’s because I have very little pride, but if I was forced to pick between poverty and a job that had room, board, meals, free clothing and the occassional butt squeeze I would learn to grin and bare the squeezes and stop whinning so much. There was very little character growth so she was typically the same for most of the book. I could not get over how unrealistic she was which made the story really hard to get through. The use of letters to drive the story did help in making the book more manageable as far as reading it went. At least her life was slightly more exciting than Robinson Crusoe’s. I stand by my conviction that Fantomina rules the prose before 1800′s reading list.
My thoughts on Pamela
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I have to agree with you that the form of writing in letters made this much easier to read than Robinson Crusoe. I’m not sure if it was so much that her life in general was more exciting to read about, or rather that the letters never really were very long, and even if they were long, the novel as a whole contained breaks in the writing. In my opinion, this is what made this novel a lot easier to read, although i did find it quite interesting for the most part.