Pamela
Samuel Richardson
 Epistolary novels—novels written as series of letters—were extremely popular during the 18th century, mainly because of Richardson's Pamela. Richardson and other novelists of his time argued that the letter allowed the reader greater access to a character's thoughts. Richardson claimed that he was writing "to the moment": that is, Pamela's thoughts were recorded nearly simultaneously with her actions. In the novel, Pamela writes two kinds of letters. At the beginning, while she decides how long to stay on at Mr B's after his mother's death, she tells her parents about her various moral dilemmas and asks for their advice. After Mr. B. abducts her and imprisons her in his country house, she continues to write to her parents, but since she does not know if they will ever receive her letters, the writings are also considered a diary. In Pamela, the letters are almost exclusively written by the heroine, restricting the reader's access to the other characters; we see only Pamela's perception of them. In Richardson's other novels, Clarissa (1748) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), the reader is privy to the letters of several characters and can more effectively evaluate the characters' motivations and moral values.