Two predominant critical assumptions about Samuel Richardsonthat he is a feminist and that his novels aim to exert a straightforward didactic influence on readersare challenged by this comparative study of female exemplarity in Clarissa Sir Charles Grandison Evelina and Les Liaisons dangereuses in a theoretically and historically informed context in order to investigate the ideologically charged terrain of models and modeling in eighteenthcentury epistolary fiction. The female subjectivity transacted by Clarissas textreader relation is imagined as a site not of ethical transformation but of crippling shame and selfreproach. Koehlers readings produce a trajectory in which Burney and Laclos writing within thirtyfive years of Clarissas publication reject Richardsons use of female exemplarity as a weapon.