Here is a middle-class heroine who is fully as moral as Pamela, but with a wry sense of humor; she defers to her mother as a matter of course when marriage is in question, yet would willingly evade parental decrees; she is capable of Moll Flanders's examinations of motive, yet sees through her own hypocrisies; she lives in London in reduced circumstances and agrees to a marriage of convenience although tempted to engage in a dashing adultery; and she endures the onset of both love and jealousy without melodramatic or sentimental posturings. Other technical achievements of _Olinda_ aside, the portrait of the heroine as she reveals herself to her confidant is the novel's most significant feature. A fictional heroine of this early date who can be sententious without being tedious, who is moderately and believably witty, who is courted by a goldsmith (even though, conformably to the times, he is named Berontus) rather than a prince borrowed from _Astrée_, and who satirizes herself soberly for scorning him, who meets her ideal lover with a business letter rather than in a shipwreck, and who level-headedly fends him off because he is both married and a would-be philanderer, is a rarity indeed. _Olinda_ commends itself to the student of English literary history principally for two reasons: because it so ably anticipates in embryo so many features which the English domestic and realistic novel would develop in its age of maturity and popularity, and because we do not yet understand, and need to investigate, the cultural factors--literary, social, and economic--which prevented the kind of achievement it represents from being duplicated with any frequency for several decades. Queens College, City University of New York NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. Walter Allen, _The English Novel_ (New York, 1968), p. 4. 2. Advertised in the _Term Catalogues_, Trinity Term, 1693 (II, 466); Wing L1784, L1785. 3. It is listed in Harold C. Binkley, "Letter Writing in English Literature" (unpublished Harvard dissertation, 1923). 4. They included _Familiar Letters [of] Rochester_ (2 vols., 1697), _Familiar and Courtly Letters [of] Voiture_ (2 vols., 1700), _A Pacquet from Will's_ (2nd ed., 1705), _The Works of Mr. Thomas Brown_ (2-4 vols., 1707--), and _The Lady's Pacquet of Letters_ (1710). Briscoe was not in every case the printer of the first edition. 5. "A Cologne. Chez *****. MDCXCV." A copy of the volume is in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsénal in Paris. 6. See DNB, _s. v._ "Cockburn, Catherine"; Edmund Gosse, "Catharine Trotter, the First of the Bluestockings," _Fortnightly Review_, N. S., No. 594 (June 1916), pp. 1034-1048; Alison Fleming, "Catherine Trotter--'the Scots Sappho,'" _Scots Magazine_, XXXIII (1940), 305-314. The source from which all three are derived is Thomas Birch's _The Works of Mrs. Catherine Cockburn_ (2 vols., 1751), including letters and a prefatory biography.