Fifteen-year-old Pamela Andrews is a virtuous but poor maid working for the wealthy Lady B at her Bedfordshire home. On her deathbed, Lady B recommends that Pamela should work for her son, Mr. B. Pamela excels in her new role, and so Mr. B gives her four guineas and some silver from his mother’s pocket. Pamela sends the four guineas home to her father and mother to help with their many debts, describing her new situation in a letter, and she continues to write letters to her parents throughout the novel.
At first Pamela is overjoyed to accept her new position with Mr. B. She takes a liking to the other servants in the house, particularly Mrs. Jervis, who watches over Pamela and gives her advice. But as Pamela spends more and more time at the house, Mr. B makes increasingly aggressive advances toward Pamela. He kisses her many times without her permission, and at one point, he hides in the closet of her room to spy on her. And although Mr. B keeps promising Pamela a new role working for his sister Lady Davers at her estate, Pamela’s departure date never seems to come.
Eventually, Pamela decides she must go back to see her parents to get away from the aggressive Mr. B and preserve her “virtue” (virginity). Mr. B claims to want to marry Pamela off to his chaplain, Mr. Williams, and so he finally allows Pamela to take a coach back to her parents so she can ask for their permission to marry Mr. Williams. But what Pamela doesn’t know is that John, the man who carries her letters to her parents, has been following Mr. B’s orders, secretly showing him some of Pamela’s letters and leaving a few of them undelivered. Also, Mr. B has no intention of sending Pamela home. When Pamela gets in the coach to go home, it takes her instead to Mr. B’s Lincolnshire estate in the country, trapping her there as Mr. B’s prisoner.
At Lincolnshire, Pamela must endure the cruel Mrs. Jewkes, who always watches Pamela, even forcing her to sleep in the same bed and locking the door at night. Pamela wants to escape and see her parents, but she can’t even send letters to them, so she begins keeping a journal instead.
While at Lincolnshire, Pamela meets the chaplain Mr. Williams, who, despite depending on Mr. B to make a living, is nevertheless willing to do what he can to help Pamela escape. They exchange letters in secret using a hiding place in the garden that Mrs. Jewkes doesn’t know about.
Eventually, Mr. B gets jealous about Mr. Williams’s close relationship with Pamela, so he arranges to have Mr. Williams robbed on the road and later jailed. With the cooperation of Mrs. Jewkes, Mr. B secretly comes back to his Lincolnshire house and impersonates a maid named Nan who normally sleeps in bed with Pamela. He then assaults Pamela one night, causing her to faint.
Mr. B leaves later that night, but he continues to spy on Pamela. At one point he discovers some of Pamela’s writing and then demands to see all of it. To Pamela’s surprise, Mr. B doesn’t seem too angry about the journal pages, many of which are very critical of him—in fact, they may even move him. Eventually, he relents and allows Pamela to leave his Lincolnshire estate to go back to see her parents.
Pamela takes a coach that begins taking her back to her parents. Along the way, she receives a letter from a seemingly repentant Mr. B who says that he’s feeling physically sick with love for her. Surprisingly, Pamela realizes that she doesn’t hate Mr. B and might even find him handsome, so she goes back to see him.
When Pamela gets back, she finds that Mr. B is much kinder to her and even seems earnest about marrying her. Still, Pamela fears that Mr. B might only be trying to trick her into a sham-marriage. Mr. B does several things to try to prove himself to Pamela, including bailing Mr. Williams out of prison and hosting Pamela’s father at the estate. Eventually, the two of them agree to marry, with Pamela suggesting that Mr. B clean out his family’s cluttered chapel so that they can use it for the wedding.
Pamela and Mr. B have a small wedding that they keep secret for a while. Mr. B treats Pamela better than he did before, but some of the other local gentry, particularly Lady Davers, have a hard time accepting that Mr. B has truly married the lower-class Pamela. Despite some initial reluctance, however, Pamela eventually uses her virtue and beauty to win over the gentry—even Lady Davers—and become a respected member of society.
After marrying Mr. B, Pamela obtains a lot of money and uses most of it for charity, paying back the servants who helped her, giving some to the local poor, and arranging for her parents to get an annual income. Her happy marriage faces a challenge when she learns that Mr. B previously had a child (Miss Goodwin) with a woman named Sally Godfrey, but Pamela accepts this new development and even proposes adopting the child as their own (since Sally now lives a new married life in Jamaica). In an epilogue, the Editor summarizes some of the moral lessons of the book and says that Pamela is a role model for all to follow.
