Set in Clonmel, Ireland in August 1690, the young Irish Protestant woman Marinda is romanced by a European prince in the army of William of Orange.

There are two interpolated tales: one about the Irish princess Cluaneesha (set in pre-Norman Ireland) and one about Faniaca, an indigenous American living through the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire.

Prof Hubert McDermott has suggested the work as a possible inspiration for Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), considered the first major English novel — the two books have similar plots: "a beautiful and virtuous young woman of little or no social status falls in love with a prince or libertine who is equally besotted but whose wealth, rank and ambition make him desire only to seduce and debauch the chaste heroine, without having to marry her."

[5] John Wilson Foster wrote on how Vertue Rewarded excludes the "wild Irish" from its world (Marinda is an English-speaking Protestant, and presumably of English ancestry), and notes how the Peru story "reinforces the impression of dislocated exotica.

"[6] Vertue Rewarded is assumed to have been written by one of the British planters who settled in Ireland after the Williamite conquest, and has been described as anti-Irish propaganda.