Last night I fell asleep earlier than usual and woke up around one in the morning – I jolted awake after two hours or so of sleep in which I had, quite involuntarily, imagined myself to be the subject of the book I had been reading: Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, a monumental epistolary novel from the mid-18^th Century. I am in the foothills – just 300 pages through its 1,500 pages, almost a hundred letters in from a total of  789 – of a novel which feels like a great mountain range rather than just one peak, a vast landscape to lose yourself in. While asleep, my mind had been conversing with itself in the style of Clarissa Harlowe and Anna Howe – whose correspondence makes up most of the letters so far. Mannered, elegant, long, long sentences, sub-clause after sub-clause, each letter a vast construction (by modern standards of letter-writing) and yet miniature compared to the whole.

A phrase can ping between the authors for pages and pages – when Clarissa admits to a ‘conditional kind of liking’ for Robert Lovelace, her rakish suitor, Anna teases her for her preciousness. Clarissa teases Anna for her ‘raillery’. Fine distinctions of manner and emotion give each of them endless new thoughts, new fancies.

It is a precious world that is all their own. Clarissa is put under pressure to marry Mr Solmes because her family is interested in his great estate – she resists with a great deal of courage and wit. Most importantly, Clarissa tells Anna everything through her letter writing, which her family forbids in case Anna should sway her away from the hoped-for match with Solmes. She fights back via a dead letter-box system, a concept which should be familiar to John Le Carré readers. Her daily walks, the one liberty allowed to her, take her past the ‘poultry-yard’ where she drops off her letters in a bundle to be collected by one of Anna’s servants.

Clarissa is no longer allowed to go to church, in case she should encounter Lovelace, and she is no longer even allowed to see her own parents (until such time as she assents to their will in the matter of marriage). Her world narrows to an almost absurd extent – her family only engaging with her to berate her or to trick or spite her. But in her letters, she opens her heart to Anna, delights in the similarities between them, and together they wittily and compassionately share the travails and pressures of young female life (they are both just 18).

‘How charmingly might you and I live together, and despise them all [her own mother is also urging her into a match she does not want]’, writes Anna. ‘But to be cajoled, wire-drawn, and ensnared, like silly birds, into a state of bondage, or vile subordination; to be courted as princesses for a few weeks, in order to be treated as slave as for the rest of our lives. Indeed, my dear, as you say of Solmes, I cannot endure them!’ In a harsh and thoroughly patriarchal world, Clarissa and Anna find a new sympathy in the act of writing to each other and a powerful sense of consolation.

Clarissa Harlowe casts a long shadow over the history of European literature – and her example is also a potent reminder of the power of literature, and the power of writing itself, to console and inspire in difficult circumstances.

Robinson Crusoe’s transformation from sorrowful castaway to master of his island home begins first when he writes down his experiences as each day passes, and speeds up when he encounters a washed-up copy of the Bible.

The Polish writer Józef Czapski used his voluminous knowledge of Proust’s novel series In Search of Lost Time to give a series of lectures in the Gulag: ‘There is some Proust in me, and through Proust, bit by bit, I become aware of my own possibilities,’ he wrote in his journal. He reminded his fellow inmates, Polish officers interned by the Soviets and consigned to years of horrendous forced labour, of their possibilities, too.

‘The end of a book’s wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own,’ writes Proust, and readers may have spotted that my description of last night’s dream of Clarissa bears comparison with an experience recorded in the first pages of In Search of Lost Time: ‘I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V.’ The narrator, much like Clarissa, is operating in straitened circumstances. He immediately compares himself to ‘an invalid who… awakens in a moment of illness’. His current life seems to be entirely occupied by recalling, at night, his life gone by. He is himself the invalid victim of his sheltered childhood, prone to nervous fits and panics. He discovers most of what he knows about the world through moments of aesthetic ecstasy, reacting with paroxysms of delight to the idea of the theatre, the structure of a medieval church, at a certain scene from a novel.

The narrator’s reading habits – religion, the state, and Europe’s musical tradition – illustrate the degree to which Proust forecasts the grand destiny of his own work – to bring Europe’s religious, historical and sensual destinies into one final, great artwork, in which all of its constituent elements can be brought together and made new and fresh. He was writing against time, dying shortly after finishing his final volume. He almost always worked through the night.

In a powerful piece by Ian Leslie on his Substack, The Ruffian, titled ‘How – and Why – To Read… in a World That’s Giving Up On It’, Leslie reflects on the coming of a visual post-literate society, in which ‘the vibe is king’. Globally, literacy is in retreat, as text-based media is supplanted by ‘a realm of video and audio’. ‘Literacy,’ he writes, ‘inculcates particular habits of thought and discourse that orality does not.’ Those ‘particular habits of thought’ are, as he notes, hard-won and counter-intuitive – but they are also self-evidently one of the most powerful coping mechanisms human beings have developed over the past couple of thousand years.

‘Particular habits of thought’ get Clarissa through unimaginable familial pressure, draw Proust back into the mysteries of childhood, and found me, last night, half-asleep, imagining myself in a bigger, broader, more beautiful reality than my own.