Dishonoured

Michael Wood

• The Rapes of Lucretia by Ian Donaldson
  Oxford, 203 pp, £15.00, October 1982, ISBN 0 19 812638 7
• The Rape of Clarissa by Terry Eagleton
  Blackwell, 109 pp, £10.00, September 1982, ISBN 0 631 13031 4
• Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters by Carol Houlihan Flynn
  Princeton, 342 pp, £17.70, May 1982, ISBN 0 691 06506 3

‘All the unhurried day,’ Philip Larkin wrote, addressing a long-dead girl who had been drugged and raped in London, ‘Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.’ All that day, and many days more, no doubt. But then presumably, since the girl later talked calmly enough to Mayhew, the drawer gradually closed, the glint of the knives softened, and life continued.