This is the first part of a study of the local field effects on (non)linear optical susceptibilities of solutions of para-nitroaniline (pNA) in three different solvents, cyclohexane (CH), 1,4-dioxane (DI), and tetrahydrofuran (THF), using a discrete molecular representation of the condensed phase. To account for dipolar and quadrupolar effects, the latter of which are especially important for DI solution, all the electric properties necessary to compute the local fields and local field gradients in quadrupolar approximation as well as the dipolar hyperpolarizabilities for the four molecules are computed, including frequency dispersion and vibrational contributions to the dipolar properties. The convergence of the perturbation treatment for the pure vibrational (PV) contributions is examined by comparison of the values obtained at the lowest order with those of partially computed second order in mechanical and electrical anharmonicity. For pNA, for which previous computations of the hyperpolarizabilities have generally found poor agreement with experimental results, a thorough investigation of the effects of solvent-induced geometry changes, dynamic and static correlation, frequency dispersion, and classical thermal averaging over the torsional modes of the substituent groups and the inversion mode of the amino group on the dipolar properties is carried out. Computations using self-consistent continuum reaction field models show that the amino group is substantially less pyramidalized in polar solvents than in the gas phase. With all the effects taken into account, reasonable agreement with the experimental electricfield induced second harmonic generation (EFISH) result on pNA vapor of Kaatz, Donley, and Shelton (J. Chem. Phys. 1997, 108, 849) is obtained.