The relations of property to personality are as fundamental to Clarissa as they were to the culture in which the novel was written. They are also as varied. Richardson testifies to the centrality of property by having the inheritance of an estate precipitate the plot of his novel. But with Clarissa as legatee, it is gender that becomes the key complication around which the issue of possession revolves. Conventionally a conduit for property, woman here acquires the means by which she can become an agent in her own right. But the contemporary strictures that define female behavior make impossible Clarissa's translation of private virtue into public action. Hence her female confirmation of the traditional link between ethical disinterestedness and land ownership comes to be disallowed.

In narrating the matter of the inheritance retrospectively, Richardson further casts the bequest as a symbol of a past order whose efficacy the novel will then contest. The terms of the grandfather's will which provoke the novel's initial struggle thus problematize the governing assumptions of the civic humanist discourse that served as “the dominant paradigm for the individual inhabiting the world of value” in early eighteenth-century Britain. The symmetrical balancing of his bequest at the novel's beginning with Clarissa's at its end encourages a comparative reading of the two.

The terms of Clarissa's own will represent a significantly different understanding of the relation of self to property.