"Janet Aikins Yount's edition is a fine achievement. It will be warmly welcomed as a major publication in literary studies." - Jocelyn Harris, Professor Emerita, University of Otago, NZ.

"Thank you, Janet Aikins Yount, for doing the heavy lifting for future scholars of Samuel Richardson! Never before have we had a critical heritage study of Clarissa this voluminous and complete. Documenting the novel’s influence through two world wars and up to the start of the Cold War, this meticulous combination of critical commentary and source material shows how Richardson’s eighteenth-century masterpiece rippled through the intellectual waters of the twentieth. Yount’s go-to reference work is sure to launch a new wave of interest in the most important novel ever written".
- Professor Janine Barchas, Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in English Literature, University of Texas at Austin.

"Not every modernist scholar-critic embraced Clarissa but Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence engaged in vital debates about its substance, style, and narrative technique. Alongside these novelists are several literary critics well known to the academy, Austin Dobson, Ian Watt, and Joseph Wood Krutch, and many more who deserve to be better remembered, like Sheila Kaye-Smith and Dorothy Van Ghent. It’s rare to read a work as authoritative, comprehensive, and at the same time as perceptive as this reception study. Its presentation of these and other voices from across the Anglophone world will help make possible a thorough reconsideration of Richardson’s place in the rise of the novel. Students of the history of formal realism, the nature of bourgeois heroism, the rise of English studies in continental Europe, and the relation of early fiction to the intellectual and cultural history of its own time and ours, especially, will profit enormously from these pages." - Timothy Erwin, Professor of English, University of Nevada, Las Vegas