The Virtuous Orphan Or, The Life of Marianne, Countess of *****

Marivaux’s La vie de Marianne was one of the most popular novels of the eighteenth century. Three different but related English translations appeared between 1736 and 1746 and were reprinted at least a dozen times by 1786. Fielding and Fanny Burney openly admitted the influence of Marivaux. Sterne has been connected with him by scholars, and the Richardson-Marivaux problem (particularly the influence upon Pamela) has been discussed since the eighteenth century. References to the novel and the novelist are to be found in the works, correspondence, or conversations of such figures as Gray, Chesterfield, Johnson, Arthur Murphy, James Beattie, Horace Walpole, and the Earl of Orrery—a clear indication that the work is valuable not only as a direct influence upon the English novel but also as a touchstone of taste during the period. However, no new edition has appeared since 1746, with the exception of a severely condensed and rearranged redaction by Sir Gilbert Campbell in 1889, of which a copy exists in the Bodleian library. To fill this need, the editors of this new edition have selected the 1743 translation of Mrs. Mary Collyer, entitled The Virtuous Orphan; or, The Life of Marianne, Countess of * * * * * as the best version stylistically and as the most interesting, since it includes the eleven parts written by Marivaux and concludes both the story of Marianne and of La Religieuse, which he left unfinished. The Collyer version, therefore, offers students of English and comparative literature an interesting exercise in eighteenth-century methods of translation and adaptation as well as the instructive metamorphosis (in the added twelfth part) of the French Marianne into an English heroine, who greatly resembles Richardson’s Pamela. Rarely equaled as a psychological study of “the consummate coquette,” the novel also provides an unusually detailed and witty analysis of the early eighteenth-century balance of reason and sensibility, which was to be a key motif in English fiction until the time of Jane Austen and beyond. This edition, prepared with notes and a critical introduction by W. H. McBurney and Michael Shugrue, provides the complex bibliographical history of Marianne, its chronology of editions, and a list of useful studies. Spelling, punctuation, and paragraphing have been modernized without textual change.