Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was a spy for Charles II, a playwright, poet, and novelist, and the first English woman to make a living from writing. Her pen name was Astrea. Ernest A. Baker (1869-1941) was an English writer and historian of literature. In 1905, 216 years after Mrs Behn's death, he introduced this collection of ten of her novels in the language of his day, a form which was not a facsimile of her texts. This ebook, prepared 329 years after her death, silently corrects some typos, and makes further changes. The Introduction and three of the stories contain many poems. The ten stories are: Oronooko, The Fair Jilt, The Nun, Agnes de Castro, The Lover's Watch, The Case for the Watch, The Lady's Looking Glass, The Lucky Mistake, The Court of the King of Bantam, and, The Adventure of the Black Lady.
Introduction
To most people nowadays the name of Aphra Behn conveys nothing more intelligible than certain vague associations of license and impropriety. She is dimly remembered as the author of plays and novels, now unread, that embodied the immorality of Restoration times, and were all the more scandalous in that they were written by a woman. Her works are to be found in few libraries, and are rarely met with at the booksellers’. Although they were republished in an expensive form and in a limited edition in 1871, they have now been many years out of print. Nor is this much to be regretted. Her novels are worth reprinting now and again, not because they are more clever, but because they are less offensive to modern taste than her comedies; and in addition to their intrinsic merits, they have an interest for the student of literature. But a general reprint of the plays would hardly be justified, at least, in anything like a cheap and popular form. This is a case where, for many reasons, it is best to have one’s reading done by proxy.
The obstacles which she herself has set to our appreciation have done her an injustice. In dismissing her merely as a purveyor of scandalous amusement in a profligate age, we are apt to give her none of the credit due to a long career of arduous work and of persevering struggle against adverse circumstances. Mrs. Behn was not only the first Englishwoman who became a novelist and a playwright, but the first of all those numerous women who have earned their livelihood by their pens.
We can form a better idea of the once popular Astrea from her works than from the scanty memorials that have come down to us; more is known of her personal character than about the events of her life. The so-calledHistory of the Life and Memoirs of Mrs. Aphra Behn, written by one of the Fair Sex, and prefixed to the collection of her histories and novels published in 1735, is rather of the nature of a eulogium and of a vindication from certain aspersions on her conduct and originality than of any biographical value. The admiring writer, although she describes herself as an intimate friend, seems to have known less about her subject than the average jounialist who is called upon to produce an obituary notice in a hurry, and to have pressed into her service a great deal of gossip, with letters, presumably written by Mrs. Behn, but undated, recounting tender episodes from Astrea’s own history and that of her acquaintances, which read more like studies for her novels than authentic epistles. Astrea, probably, whilst she affected to pour out the secrets of her heart into the bosom of her friend, preferred to wrap the actual incidents of her life in romantic obscurity. Thus we are told that “She was a gentlewoman by birth, of a good family in the city of Canterbury in Kent; her father’s name was Johnson, whose relation to the Lord Willoughby drew him for the advantageous post of Lieutenant-General of many isles, besides the continent of Surinam, from his quiet retreat at Canterbury, to run the hazardous voyage of the West Indies. With him he took
