_Clarissa_ is, as has been well said, the "Eve of fiction, the prototype of the modern heroine"; feminine psychology as good as unknown before (Shakespeare's women being the "Fridays" of a highly intelligent Crusoe) has hardly been brought further since.

But _Clarissa_ is more than mere psychology; whether she represents a contemporary tendency or whether Richardson made her so, she starts a new epoch.

"This," says Henley, "is perhaps her finest virtue as it is certainly her greatest charm; that until she set the example, woman in literature as a self-suffering individuality, as an existence endowed with equal rights to independence--of choice, volition, action--with man had not begun to be." She had not begun to be it in life either.
What Richardson did for the subtlest part of a novelist's business, his dealings with psychology, Fielding did for the most necessary part of it, the telling of the story.

Before him hardly any story had been told well; even if it had been plain and clear as in Bunyan and Defoe it had lacked the emphasis, the light and shade of skilful grouping.

On the "picaresque" (so the autobiographical form was called abroad) convention of a journey he grafted a structure based in its outline on the form of the ancient epic.