Blue leather spine ( faded to green ) with gilt raised banding, decoration and title on the spine. Blue marbled boards. Paste down has the nameplate of Killingworth Richard Hedges.

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FIRST EDITION – Reprint of the 17th century edition

Superb quality

First Thus. Facsimile reprint edition of the 1724 third edition of the Plays and 1735 edition of the Novels. Complete, including frontis. Internally fresh and unmarked. A lovely example with trivial wear, most noticeably to the upper front corner of volume II and the spine ends of volume IV. Most often noted as the first professional woman playwright in England, Aphra Behn used her literary works to promote the employment of women (casting a notably higher percentage of actresses than her male contemporaries), to depict the social and economic precarity of women in her time, and to present women writers as equal in intelligence and irreverence to men. Here, her works are beautifully drawn together; and then as now, they offer a new generation the opportunity to witness her genius.

Aphra Behn bapt. 14 December 1640 – 16 April 1689) was an English playwright, poet, prose writer and translator from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors. Rising from obscurity, she came to the notice of Charles II, who employed her as a spy in Antwerp. Upon her return to London and a probable brief stay in debtor’s prison, she began writing for the stage. She belonged to a coterie of poets and famous libertines such as John Wilmot, Lord Rochester. Behn wrote under the pastoral pseudonym Astrea. During the turbulent political times of the Exclusion Crisis, she wrote an epilogue and prologue that brought her into legal trouble; she thereafter devoted most of her writing to prose genres and translations. A staunch supporter of the
Stuart line, she declined an invitation from Bishop Burnet to write a welcoming poem to the new king William III. She died shortly after. She is remembered in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds”. Her grave is
not included in the Poet’s Corner but lies in the East Cloister near the steps to the church. Her best-known works are Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave, sometimes described as an early novel, and the play The Rover.