Aphra Behn had published Love Letters Between…

Aphra Behn had published Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister in 1684 as the first part of a three-volume roman à clef playing with events of the Monmouth Rebellion and exploring the genre of the epistolary novel.

Love Letters From a Noble Man to his Sister, Part Two, was published in 1685; the third installment was published in 1687 as The Amours of Philander and Silvia.

Behn in 1688 published Oroonoko, a short novel concerning the tragic love of its hero, an enslaved African in Surinam in the 1660s, and the author's own experiences in the new South American colony.

It is generally claimed (most famously by Virginia Woolf) that Aphra Behn was the first professional female author in English, living entirely by her own earnings.

While this is not entirely true, Behn was the first professional female dramatist, as well as one of the first English novelists, male or female.

Although she had written at least one novel previously, Behn's Oroonoko is both one of the earliest English novels and one of the earliest by a woman.

She dies at forty-eight on April 16, 1689, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Below the inscription on her tombstone read the words: "Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be / Defence enough against Mortality."