In a series of letters to her parents, 15-year-old Pamela Andrews recounts her tribulations as a servant in the house of Mr. B. The infatuated master's repeated attempts at seduction―foiled again and again by the quick-witted maid―lead to Pamela's abduction and imprisonment in a remote country house, where the unlikely couple truly come to know one another.
Samuel Richardson, one of England's early novelists, published Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded anonymously in 1740. The first bestseller in English fiction, Pamela excited a storm of controversy, in which it was both denounced as thinly veiled pornography and praised for setting an example of righteous conduct. Its publication marks a defining moment in the development of the modern novel, in which the genre suddenly and irrevocably developed the potential for moral seriousness. Three centuries later, Richardson's novel remains an engaging tale of psychological complexity.