In his novel Clarissa (1748-49), Samuel Richardson produces a model of friendship and human connection that depends upon the “necessary absence” of letter writing (6). In the increasingly restricted environment of the novel, Clarissa and her friend Anna perform their friendship through their letters, evoking their spaces of writing and reading to create a shared imagined space in which to foster intimacy and maintain their social connection. 270 years later, two separate but related groups of readers picked up Richardson’s novel, to share an experience of reading apart, together. From across the world, academics and literary enthusiasts shared their experiences of reading Clarissa via Twitter using #Clarissa2020 to chart their course through the novel, reading each letter on the date it is written in the novel. This endeavour began before the global outbreak of Covid-19 but took on new resonances when the pandemic caused those readers, like Clarissa herself, to be locked down. In the wake of the outbreak in May 2020 a reading group of academics in the US selected Clarissa as “the long, immersive novel for the moment” (Lynch), meeting over zoom to discuss the novel throughout the northern hemisphere summer of 2020. Twelve members of the reading group contributed to an issue of the online journal The Rambling, to reflect upon their shared experience of reading the novel in lockdown. This paper examines the ways in which these groups–#Clarissa2020 and the reading group Clarissa, in Lockdown, Together–share their experience of reading in virtual and digital spaces, collaboratively building an online community for human social connection during a time of absence and isolation. It argues that these digital spaces and virtual communities are built through the same methods deployed by Clarissa and Anna to maintain their friendship through their correspondence. Using the exchange of text (whether the letter, a tweet, a poem or an article) #Clarissa2020 and Clarissa, in Lockdown, Together evoke the affective experiences, physical places, and imagined spaces of their reading to remap and rearticulate the novel in the twenty-first century digital landscape. In doing so, they build, Like Clarissa and Anna, a new virtual and imagined space for human social connection.

Lynch, Deidre. “‘Nothing of Body:’ Our Clarissa Quarantine.” The Rambling, no. 11, June 2021, https://the-rambling.com/2021/06/11/issue11-lynch/.

Richardson, Samuel. Correspondence with Sarah Wescomb, Frances Grainger and Laetitia Pilkington. Edited by John A. Dussinger, Cambridge University Press, 2014.