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, vsimilar 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):

v

[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 viat moments of (mild) suspense, the bringing up of the action to an 

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