SOURCE: Introduction to Olinda's Adventures: Or the Amours of a Young Lady, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California—Los Angeles, 1969, pp. i-vii.

In the following introduction to his edition of the anonymous 1693 epistolary narrative Olinda's Adventures, Day claims that the story is interesting because it contains many elements that precede the works of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson and that anticipate aspects of later realistic novels.

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, scandalchronicles, translations and imitations of French nouvelles, or short sensational...