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_.