This book introduces the reader to a range of texts written by Aphra Behn. Behn wrote a vast quantity of material: Montague Summers's edition remained incomplete at six large volumes. Behn's work, as opposed to her life, is now the subject of critical attention. Behn has long been the focus of historical and feminist study - she is, for example, an important figure in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own - and there have been several biographies and assessments of her fascinating life. These biographies have dealt with literary texts, but this study is a non-biographical book devoted to her writings. For that reason, and because discussion has so often concentrated on only one or two of her texts, I have chosen to write short essays on most of the genres she wrote in, attempting to introduce both Behn's bestk-nown texts and a range of her less-known writings.

The two texts which are usually taken as representative of Behn's writing, the play The Rover and the fictional piece Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave are discussed in this study. But in each case these texts are within sections dealing with a range of Behn's output in drama and prose. A reader can compare The Rover with Behn's other comedies, or set the concerns of Oroonoko alongside the other fiction she wrote. By organizing the volume by genre - poetry first, then plays, and finally prose - it has been possible to follow roughly the chronology of Behn's writing. Behn wrote and published poetry throughout her life, but the period of her greatest theatrical output coincided with the dominance of the stage in English cultural life from the late 1670s to the mid-1680s. Then, when the theatre failed as a source of income for writers, she turned to the emerging market for prose narratives. The longer fictions such as Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister and Oroonoko belong to the last years of her life, the later 1680s.

Aphra Behn's prodigious literary output was bound to the commercial genres of her time, to the institutions of publishing performance, and reading dominant in Restoration London. She wrote marketable texts.