It is undoubtedly the personal character of her poems that secured her so wide and favorable an audience while her writings were still in manuscript and known only as they passed from hand to hand. Each person addressed was the center of a new circle of readers. But the intimacy of the poems is one reason for the actual agony Orinda suffered when an unauthorized edition of her poems appeared in 1662. "Their Names expos'd in this Impression without their leave" was the burden of her grief. And she was likewise injured in her modesty. The publication seemed to put her in the position of a woman bold and masculine enough to send her writings into the world. A thousand pounds, she says, would not have bought her consent. To Sir Charles Cotterell she wrote:
To me (Sir) who never writ any line in my life with any intention to have it printed.... This is a most cruel accident, and hath made so proportionate an impression upon me, that really it hath cost me a sharp fit of sickness since I heard it.
If the garbled version makes a true version a necessary reparation of the misfortune she will yield, "but with the same reluctancy as I would cut off a Limb to save my Life."
I am so far from expecting applause for anything I scribble, that I can hardly expect pardon; and sometimes I think that employment so far above my reach, and unfit for my Sex, that I am going to resolve against it for ever; and could I have recovered those fugitive Papers that have escaped my hands, I had long since made a sacrifice of them all. The truth is, I have an incorrigible inclination to that folly of riming, and intending the effects of that humour, only for my own amusement in a retir'd life; I did not so much resist it as a wiser woman would have done.[109]
She had been planning a visit to London, but she wrote in despair to Dorothy Osborne (then Mrs. Temple):
I must never show my face there or among any reasonable people again, for some dishonest person hath got some collection of my Poems as I heare, and hath deliver'd them to a Printer who I heare is just upon putting them out and this hath soe extreamly disturbed me, both to have my private folly so unhandsomely exposed and ye belief that I believe the most part of ye world are apt enough to believe yt I connived at this ugly accident that I have been on ye rack ever since I heard it, though I have written to Col. Jeffries who first sent me word of it to get ye Printer punished, the book called in, and me someway publicly vindicated yet I shall need all my friends to be my champions to ye criticall and mallicious that I am soe innocent of this pittiful design of a knave to get a groat that I never was more vexed at anything and yt I utterly disclaim whatever he hath so unhandsomely expos'd. I know you have goodness and generosity enough to doe me right in your company and to give me your opinion too how I may best get this impression supressed and myself vindicated and therefore I will not beg your pardon for troubling you with this impertinent story.[110]
Her pride of authorship would, however, almost certainly have triumphed over her modesty if she could have lived to see the sumptuous volume with its bravery of eulogistic verse in which Sir Charles Cotterell enshrined her work. Her letters to him, under the title Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus, were published in 1705 and add distinctly to her fame.
On the whole, Orinda becomes a personage to us and an agreeable one. There is a note of sincerity through even her most unrestrained poems; the ardor of her affections is unmistakable; her loyalty to the King, to her friends, to her ideas, is genuine. She does not labor compliments. Her praise pours forth from the abundance of her feeling. Perhaps one reason for her ready popularity was that she aroused no antagonisms. Though a literary woman there was nothing about her that was masculine, strident, or assertive. Her outlook on life was gracious and tolerant. She loved simplicity and retirement and was never dazzled by wealth or titles.
At any rate, there is one interesting and significant fact about her and that is her success. It was a kind of success new in English literary history. A woman without any commanding advantages of birth or fortune, only moderately good-looking, without any compelling fascination, unstimulated by parental or tutorial ambitions, with but the scantiest schooling, married to an ordinary, rather dull man; a virtuous, sane, orderly, thrifty woman, excellent in business, housewifely, with no eccentricities, simply follows her feelings in friendship and the bent of her mind towards authorship, and attains in a few years a position notably high.
Mary North (d. 1662)