[In the following introduction to his edition of the anonymous 1693 epistolary narrative Olinda's Adventures, Day claims that the story is interesting because it contains many elements that precede the works of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson and that anticipate aspects of later realistic novels.]

A standard modern history of the English novel speaks of “the appearance of the novel round about 1700. Nothing that preceded it in the way of prose fiction can explain it.”¹ Though today many scholars would assert that “nothing” is too strong a term, just how much of the original fiction written under the later Stuarts could “explain” Defoe and Richardson? Most late seventeenth-century novels, it is true, are rogue biographies, scandalchronicles, translations and imitations of French nouvelles, or short sensational romances of love, intrigue, and adventure with fantastic plots and wooden characters. Only occasionally was a tale published which showed that it was not examples of the novelist's craft that were wanting to inspire the achievement of a Defoe, but rather the sustained application of that craft over hundreds of pages by the unique combination of talents of a Defoe himself.

Such a novel is Olinda's Adventures, a brief epistolary narrative of 1693, a minor but convincing demonstration of the theory that a literary form such as the novel develops irregularly, by fits and starts, and of the truism that a superior mind can produce superior results with the most seemingly ungrateful materials. Of Defoe, Olinda's Adventures must appear a modest precursor indeed; but measured, as a realistic-domestic novel, against the English fiction of its day, it is surprisingly mature; and if we believe the bookseller and assign its authorship to a girl of fourteen, we must look to the juvenilia of Jane Austen for the first comparable phenomenon.

Olinda's Adventures seems to owe what success it had entirely to the bookseller Samuel Briscoe. It appeared in 1693 in the first volume of his epistolary miscellany Letters of Love and Gallantry and Several Other Subjects. All Written by Ladies, the second volume following in 1694.² It may have been the nucleus of the collection, however, since it begins the volume, and since Briscoe states in “The Bookseller to the Reader” (sig. A2) that various ladies, hearing that he was going to print Olinda's letters, have sent in amorous correspondence of their own—a remark that could indicate some previous circulation in manuscript. Another edition (or issue) of the miscellany, with a slightly altered title, was advertised in 1697, but no copy of this is recorded.³ Nothing further is heard of Olinda for some years, but meanwhile Briscoe became something of a specialist in popular epistolary miscellanies, perhaps because he was a principal employer of Tom Brown, much of whose output consisted of original and translated “familiar letters.” In 1718 Briscoe assembled a two-volume epistolary collection with the title Familiar Letters of Love, Gallantry and Several Occasions; this collection was apparently made up of the best and most popular items in his miscellanies of the past twenty-five years.⁴ Here Olinda appears in much more impressive company than the anonymous “ladies,” for the collection includes the first letter of Heloise to Abelard (said to be translated by L'Estrange) with actual correspondence and epistolary fiction by Butler, Mrs. Behn, Dennis, Otway, Etherege, Dryden, Tom Brown, Mrs. Mary Manley, Farquhar, Mrs. Centlivre, and other wits. Another edition (or issue) was advertised for W. Chetwood in 1720; and if the edition of 1724 (“Corrected. With Additions”) is really the sixth, as Briscoe's title-page states, Olinda must have reached a respectable number of readers.

Olinda enjoyed another distinction, nearly unique for English popular fiction before 1700. While by the middle of the eighteenth century novel-readers in France were reveling in the adventures of the English epigones of Pamela and Clarissa, defending their virtue or exhibiting their sensibility in translation, the current of literary influence before Defoe ran overwhelmingly in the opposite direction. Olinda anticipated the Miss Sally Sampsons of sixty years later by appearing in 1695 in a French translation as Les Amours d'une belle Angloise: ou la vie et les avantures de la jeune Olinde: Ecrites par Elle mesme en forme de lettres à un Chevalier de ses amis.⁵ Whether merit or mere chance accounted for this unusual occurrence it is impossible to say; the translation of Olinda is a faithful one, though the text is at times expanded by the insertion of poems into Olinda's letters, with brief interpolated passages which rather awkwardly account for their presence. Curiously, the volume closes with a list of books printed for Briscoe, indicating either that the French translator would do anything to fill up space, or that Briscoe may have been exploring the possibilities of a French market for his wares.

While Olinda was ascribed merely to an anonymous “young lady” in the first edition, the editions of 1718 and 1724 gave it to “Mrs. Trotter.” This lady, who since 1707 had been the wife of the Reverend Patrick Cockburn, a Suffolk curate, was then living in relative obscurity (her husband, having lost his living at the accession of George I, was precariously supporting his family by teaching), though she had enjoyed a certain literary success in King William's time and would later be heard from as a “learned lady” and writer on ethics. The fact that her maiden name was used, though not likely in 1718 to add very much luster to Briscoe's collection, and the similarities between the heroine's situation and Mrs. Trotter's own early life … make Briscoe's attribution seem worthy of acceptance. It is true that if Mrs. Trotter wrote Olinda she did it at fourteen. But she had been a child of astonishing precocity; she had produced a successful blank-verse tragedy at sixteen, and both Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Jane Austen were to perform similar novelistic feats (to say nothing of Daisy Ashford).

Catherine Trotter (1679-1749)⁶ was the daughter of David Trotter, a naval commander who died on a voyage in 1683, and Sarah Bellenden (or Ballenden), whose connections with the Maitland and Drummond families seem to have helped support her and her daughter in genteel poverty until she gained a pension of £20 per year under Queen Anne; Bishop Burnet was also her friend and patron. Catherine, a child prodigy, learned Latin and logic, and is said to have taught herself French; she extemporized verses in childhood, and at fourteen composed a poem on Mr. Bevil Higgons's recovery from the smallpox which is no worse than many “Pindarics” of the period. In 1695, however, Catherine Trotter established herself as a female wit with the impressive success of her tragedy Agnes de Castro, adapted from Mrs. Behn's retelling of an episode from Portuguese history. It was produced at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in December, with a prologue by Wycherley and with Mr. and Mrs. Verbruggen and Colley Cibber in the cast. The Fatal Friendship, a tragedy produced at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1698, had a moderate success; two later plays did not. But Mrs. Trotter gained the acquaintance of Congreve, Dryden, and Farquhar, and was well enough known to be lampooned in The Female Wits (1704; acted 1696) along with Mrs. Pix and Mrs. Manley. In 1702 she turned to more serious writing, and her Defence of the Essay of Humane Understanding and other treatises defending Locke's theories against the charge of materialism were impressive enough to earn her a flattering letter from Locke himself; she also corresponded with Leibniz, who analyzed her theories at some length. The History of the Works of the Learned printed an essay of hers on moral obligation in 1743, and in 1747 Warburton contributed a preface to one of her treatises.

If we are willing to admit that Olinda is Mrs. Trotter's work, its virtues may be explained in part by seeing it as romanticized autobiography. Olinda, like Mrs. Trotter, is a wit and something of a beauty in adolescence, a fatherless child living with a prudent mother who is anxious to marry her off advantageously, and a solicitor of favors from noble or wealthy connections. Of the details of her character and circumstances at this time, however, no information is certain, and we must rely upon two presumably biased contemporary portraits. Mrs. Trotter gets off lightly in The Female Wits; she is represented (in “Calista,” a small role) as being somewhat catty and pretentious, vain of her attainments in Latin and Greek (she has read Aristotle in the original, she says), but her moral character is not touched upon.⁷ Another account of her early life, in Mrs. Manley's fictionalized autobiography and scandal-chronicle, The Adventures of Rivella (1714), may be entirely unreliable; but its author was certainly well acquainted with Mrs. Trotter, and what she says of her life in the 1690's, what is narrated in Olinda, and what Mrs. Trotter's scholarly memoirist Thomas Birch relates are similar in outline, similar enough so that we may speculate that the same set of facts has been “improved” in Olinda, perhaps maliciously distorted in Rivella. Cleander, the Platonic friend of the novel, Orontes, the kidnapped bridegroom, and Cloridon, the inconveniently married noble lover, appear to be three aspects of the same person; for Mrs. Manley tells at length (pp. 64-71) of “Calista's” relationship with “Cleander” (identified in the “key” to Rivella as Mrs. Trotter and Mr. Tilly).⁸ John Tilly, the deputy warden of the Fleet prison, whose mistress Mrs. Manley became and remained until 1702, first met her, she says, through Mrs. Trotter, who sought her aid in interceding with her cousin John Manley, appointed chairman of a committee to look into alleged misdemeanors of Tilly as prison administrator. Mrs. Trotter, says Mrs. Manley, was a prude in public, not so in private; she was the first, “Cleander” said, who ever made him unfaithful to his wife. Mrs. Manley goes on, with a tantalizing lack of clarity (pp. 101-102):

[Calista's] Mother being in Misfortunes and indebted to him, she had offered her Daughter's Security, he took it, and moreover the Blessing of one Night's Lodging, which he never paid her back again. … [Calista] had given herself Airs about not visiting Rivella, now she was made the Town-Talk by her Scandalous Intreague with Cleander.

Whatever the truth about Mrs. Trotter's adolescent amours may have been, or whether they have any connection with Olinda's fictional ones, must remain a matter for speculation; but the artistic merits of Olinda are in no such doubt. Although technically it may be called an epistolary novel, its author is no Richardson in marshalling the strategies of the epistolary technique. Nevertheless, although it is actually a fictional autobiography divided somewhat arbitrarily into “letters,” the postponement of the letter to Cloridon until the end, the introduction of what might be called a subplot as Olinda tries to promote Cleander's courtship of Ambrisia and notes its progress, the breaking off of the letters at moments of (mild) suspense, the bringing up of the action to an uncompleted present, all these show an awareness of fictional mechanics that is far from elementary. Indeed, a contemporary critic might go so far as to see in the novel's conclusion an anticipation of the “open-ended” realism of plotting so much applauded at present; for though Orontes has been got out of the way, Olinda has not yet been rewarded with Cloridon's hand by a similarly happy turn of fate, and must patiently await the demise of his inconvenient wife as anyone outside of melodrama might have to do. The contretemps and misunderstandings, the trick played on Olinda with regard to Cloridon's fidelity and her subsequent undeceiving, the closet-scene and its embarrassments, may smack of the hackneyed devices of stage comedy, but they are not clumsily handled, and they never make emotional mountains out of molehills.

Perhaps the most salient qualities of Olinda, in contrast to the fiction of its day, are restraint and control. With the exception of the rather ridiculous way in which the complications are resolved at the end (Orontes's sequestration and death from smallpox), everything in the novel is planned and motivated with some care. Inclinations develop slowly and believably; the spring of action, barring a few not very fantastic coincidences and accidents, are anti-romantic—almost too much so. Indeed, such criteria of the “modern novel” as those proposed by Ian Watt⁹ are all modestly but adequately met. Most important, the situation and behavior of the heroine, her values, and the world in which she lives are (but for their sketchy development) what a reader of Jane Austen might take for granted, yet are all but unique before 1740.

Here is a middle-class heroine who is fully as moral as Pamela, but with a wry sense of humor; she defers to her mother as a matter of course when marriage is in question, yet would willingly evade parental decrees; she is capable of Moll Flanders's examinations of motive, yet sees through her own hypocrisies; she lives in London in reduced circumstances and agrees to a marriage of convenience although tempted to engage in a dashing adultery; and she endures the onset of both love and jealousy without melodramatic or sentimental posturings.

Other technical achievements of Olinda aside, the portrait of the heroine as she reveals herself to her confidant is the novel's most significant feature. A fictional heroine of this early date who can be sententious without being tedious, who is moderately and believably witty, who is courted by a gold-smith (even though, conformably to the times, he is named Berontus) rather than a prince borrowed from Astree, and who satirizes herself soberly for scorning him, who meets her ideal lover with a business letter rather than in a shipwreck, and who level-headedly fends him off because he is both married and a would-be philanderer, is a rarity indeed.

Olinda commends itself to the student of English literary history principally for two reasons: because it so ably anticipates in embryo so many features which the English domestic and realistic novel would develop in its age of maturity and popularity, and because we do not yet understand, and need to investigate, the cultural factors-literary, social, and economic—which prevented the kind of achievement it represents from being duplicated with any frequency for several decades.

Notes

1. Walter Allen, The English Novel (New York, 1968), p. 4.

2. Advertised in the Term Catalogues, Trinity Term, 1693 (II, 466); Wing L1784, L1785.

3. It is listed in Harold C. Binkley, “Letter Writing in English Literature” (unpublished Harvard dissertation, 1923).

4. They included Familiar Letters [of] Rochester (2 vols., 1697), Familiar and Courtly Letters [of] Voiture (2 vols., 1700), A Pacquet from Will's (2nd ed., 1705), The Works of Mr. Thomas Brown (2-4 vols., 1707—), and The Lady's Pacquet of Letters (1710). Briscoe was not in every case the printer of the first edition.

5. “A Cologne. Chez ***. MDCXCV.” A copy of the volume is in the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal in Paris.

6. See DNB, s. v. “Cockburn, Catherine”; Edmund Gosse, “Catharine Trotter, the First of the Bluestockings,” Fortnightly Review, N. S., No. 594 (June 1916), pp. 1034-1048; Alison Fleming, “Catherine Trotter—‘the Scots Sappho,’” Scots Magazine, XXXIII (1940), 305-314. The source from which all three are derived is Thomas Birch's The Works of Mrs. Catherine Cockburn (2 vols., 1751), including letters and a prefatory biography.

7. The play is reproduced in the Augustan Reprint Society's Publication No. 124 (Los Angeles, 1967), with an introduction by Lucyle Hook.

8. Page references are to the “second edition” of 1715. See Paul B. Anderson, “Mistress Delariviere Manley's Biography,” MP, XXXIII (1935-36), 270-271, for further details.

9. The Rise of the Novel (London, 1957), Chapter I.