Produced by Chris Curnow, Eleni Christofaki, Joseph Cooper and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Notes: This book contains inconsistent punctuation and various misspellings which have been retained as they appear in the original. An Errata List with unresolved printer errors can be found at the end of the book. Superscripts are preceded by the [^] sign and enclosed in braces if more than one letter is in superscript. The illustration at page 136 was placed at the end of the section so as not to disrupt the text. Mark up: _italics_ =bold= THE AUGUSTAN REPRINT SOCIETY OLINDA'S ADVENTURES: Or the Amours of a Young Lady (1718) _Introduction by_ ROBERT ADAMS DAY PUBLICATION NUMBER 138 WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES 1969 GENERAL EDITORS William E. Conway, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ George Robert Guffey, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Maximillian E. Novak, _University of California, Los Angeles_ ASSOCIATE EDITOR David S. Rodes, _University of California, Los Angeles_ ADVISORY EDITORS Richard C. Boys, _University of Michigan_ James L. Clifford, _Columbia University_ Ralph Cohen, _University of Virginia_ Vinton A. Dearing, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Arthur Friedman, _University of Chicago_ Louis A. Landa, _Princeton University_ Earl Miner, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Samuel H. Monk, _University of Minnesota_ Everett T. Moore, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Lawrence Clark Powell, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ James Sutherland, _University College, London_ H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., _University of California, Los Angeles_ Robert Vosper, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ CORRESPONDING SECRETARY Edna C. Davis, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Mary Kerbret, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ INTRODUCTION 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, 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.