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.

ii

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, iiithough 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.

iii

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 (to be discussed later) 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 

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