Pamela strives to reconcile her strong religious training with her desire for the approval of her employer in a series of letters and, later in the novel, journal entries all addressed to her impoverished parents.

After various unsuccessful attempts at seduction, a series of sexual assaults and an extended period of kidnapping, the rakish Mr. B eventually reforms and makes Pamela a sincere proposal of marriage.

Furthermore, Pamela was an early commentary on domestic violence and brought into question the dynamic line between male aggression and a contemporary view of love.

Moreover, Pamela, despite the controversies, shed light on social issues that transcended the novel for the time such as gender roles, early false-imprisonment, and class barriers present in the eighteenth century.

He revisited the theme of the rake in his Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady (1748), and sought to create a "male Pamela" in Sir Charles Grandison (1753).

[2] Pamela Andrews is a pious, virtuous fifteen-year-old, the daughter of impoverished labourers, who works for Lady B as a maid in her Bedfordshire estate.

After Lady B's death, her son, Mr. B, inherits the estate, and begins to pay Pamela romantic attention: first gifting her his mother's fine clothes, and then attempting to seduce her.

Pamela refuses the engagement and decides to leave the estate, but Mr. B intercepts her letters to her parents and tells them she is having an affair with a poor clergyman and that he will send her to a safe place to preserve her chastity.

Pamela is forcibly taken to Mr. B's Lincolnshire Estate by Mr. B's servant Monsieur Colbrand, where she begins a journal with the intention of sending it to her parents.

Mr. B returns and offers Pamela a list of conditions that he would meet, should she accept his hand in marriage, but she refuses, citing her reluctance to think above her social station to become his mistress.

When Mr. B leaves to attend to a sick man, his sister, Lady Davers, arrives at the estate and threatens Pamela and calls her marriage a sham.

The following day, Lady Davers enters their bedroom without permission and reveals that Mr. B previously seduced a girl, Sally Godfrey, and had a child with her.

Richardson wrote Pamela as a conduct book, a sort of manual that codified social and domestic behavior of men, women, and servants, as well as a narrative to provide a more morally-concerned literature option for young audiences.

Ironically, some readers focused more upon the bawdy details of Richardson's novel, resulting in some negative reactions and even a slew of literature satirizing Pamela and so he published a clarification in the form of A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison in 1755.

[6] Fictional epistolary narratives originated in their early form in 16th-century England; however, they acquired wider renown with the publication of Richardson's Pamela.

[8] In other words, readers of Pamela experience the trajectory of the plot, and the romance between the hero and heroine, as a back-and-forth, pendulum-like swing.

[8] Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded demonstrates morality and realism as bound up in individuals’ identities and social class because of its form as an epistolary novel.

An anecdote, which has been repeated in varying forms since 1777, described the novel's reception in an English village: "The blacksmith of the village had got hold of Richardson's novel of Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, and used to read it aloud in the long summer evenings, seated on his anvil, and never failed to have a large and attentive audience.... At length, when the happy turn of fortune arrived, which brings the hero and heroine together, and sets them living long and happily... the congregation were so delighted as to raise a great shout, and procuring the church keys, actually set the parish bells ringing.

It was even an early "multimedia" event, producing Pamela-themed cultural artefacts such as prints, paintings, waxworks, a fan, and a set of playing cards decorated with lines from Richardson's works.

Shamela portrays the protagonist as an amoral social climber who attempts to seduce "Squire Booby" while feigning innocence to manipulate him into marrying her.

Although not technically a satire, the Marquis de Sade's Justine is generally perceived as a critical response to Pamela, due in part to its subtitle, "The Misfortunes of Virtue".

has stated that the rash of satires can be viewed as a conservative reaction to a novel that called class, social and gender roles into question[13] by asserting that domestic order can be determined by not only socio-economic status but also moral qualities of mind.

Samuel Richardson claimed that the story was based on a true incident related to him by a friend about 25 years before, but did not identify the principals.

The two books have similar plots: "a beautiful and virtuous young woman of little or no social status falls in love with a prince or libertine who is equally besotted but whose wealth, rank and ambition make him desire only to seduce and debauch the chaste heroine, without having to marry her."

[19] However, the poor treatment of Pamela herself and her intense consideration to her virtue, a societal construct founded in moral religion, might also suggest the opposite.

Tillman argues that in early modern times, when letter-writing was an important and popular method of communication, "male letter readers could intercept and interpret those representations in a way that could void female agency" (125) and, because "letters... [are] an extension of the self" (Tillman 126), Pamela's privacy is at risk in myriad ways.

Pamela is strewn with contemporary themes that handle gender roles, male aggression, false imprisonment, classism, and the hierarchy of power evident through her forced stay at Mr. B's estate and seen through her kidnapping.

In France, Boissy put on a Paméla ou la Vertu mieux éprouvée, a verse comedy in three acts (Comédiens italiens ordinaires du Roi, 4 March 1743), followed Neufchâteau's five-act verse comedy Paméla ou la Vertu récompensée (Comédiens Français, 1 August 1793).

Appearing during the French Revolution, Neufchâteau's adaptation was felt to be too royalist in its sympathies by the Committee of Public Safety, which imprisoned its author and cast (including Anne Françoise Elisabeth Lange and Dazincourt) in the Madelonnettes and Sainte-Pélagie prisons.

The playwright Martin Crimp uses the text as a "provocation" for his stage play When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other: 12 Variations on Samuel Richardson's Pamela, opening at the Royal National Theatre in 2019 starring Cate Blanchett and Stephen Dillane directed by Katie Mitchell.