Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (Penguin Classics)

Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (Penguin Classics) by Behn, Aphra. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780140435375.

With Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, Aphra Behn, a leading Restoration dramatist, produced what is arguably the first long novel in English. Her witty, racy roman a clef in three volumes is set in the tumultuous years surrounding the death of Charles II in 1685. A heady mix of eroticism, sex and politics, it concentrates on a sensational aristocratic scandal of the day, the seduction of Henrietta Berkeley by her sisters husband Lord Grey, a notorious libertine, rebel and intimate of King Charless son, the Duke of Monmouth. Love-Letters depicts the desire for erotic domination at the heart of aristocratic Restoration culture - possibly of any culture, writes Janet Todd in her Introduction. As the novel unfolds, the innocence of Behns young protagonist Silvia, evident in the sincerity and passion of her love-letters, is undermined; seduction is followed by disillusionment, and Silvia transforms herself into a female rake, bent on conquest rather than love. Portraying a world in which individual appetite rules and all authority is in doubt, Love-Letters brilliantly dramatizes the perverse and anarchic nature of desire.