I really enjoyed this 17th century roman à clef which may have inspired Les Liaisons Dangereuses a century later, one of my all-time favourite classic novels with people behaving very badly indeed. The political bits inspired by true life events toward the end kind of bored me, but I might read what is known as the first English novel again eventually just for the horrid characters who play with romance and each other mercilessly—Aphra Behn obviously delighted in creating these despicable characters and it shows.

At the heart of the story is the real-life incestuous romance between Lord Grey, here known as Philander, and his wife's younger sister, known in the novel as Sylvia. He manages to seduce her with a series of outrageously romantic letters (part I is exclusively in epistolary form), and when their romance is discovered, they flee to Holland, with Sylvia pregnant with Philander's child. A clue to Philander's further conduct might be that the word 'philanderer', meaning "a man who readily or frequently enters into casual sexual relationships with women; a womanizer", apparently came to us from this book's character. In real life, there was a court case and a great scandal broke out, so that Behn was forced to transpose the events to France, especially since Lord Grey was involved in further political plots, by backing the Duke of Monmouth in his attempt to overthrow James II. Philander is a despicable character in the book which we come to delight in hating, and we can only guess that he was just as detestable in real life, but it seems he had a great knack for knowing when the tides were about to change and aligning himself with the right powers, so that he always managed to remain in favour and retained great wealth and powers, eventually becoming Lord Justice of the Realm. In the book, he succeeds in turning Sylvia, at first an innocent 17 year-old maiden, into a rapacious money-grubbing female equivalent who goes on to seduce and ruin one rich and beautiful man after another, which I suppose Aphra Behn, a feminist in her time, saw as a victory of sorts for women in those days, considering the few options open to them. ( )