Olinda's Adventures: or the Amours of a Young Lady

Olinda's Adventures: or the Amours of a Young Lady

A standard modern history of the English novel speaks ofi "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, scandal-chronicles, 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" ii(sig. A2) that various ladies, hearing that he was going to print Olinda's letters, have sent in amorous correspondence of their owna 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. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 37218
Author: Trotter, Catharine
Release Date: Aug 26, 2011
Format: eBook
Language: English