Three Faces: The story of Aphra Behn

'Three Faces' artfully brings to
life Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to make her living as a professional
writer. How did the daughter of a Kentish barber and a wet nurse come to
rub shoulders with the highest in the land and be buried in Westminster Abbey
as a celebrated poet, playwright and novelist?



It is 16 April 1689. Aphra Behn is dying. She looks back on a life requiring her to hide her
background, her feelings and her loyalties, showing different faces to
different people. On His Majesty's secret service, she has travelled widely
on the Continent and to the American colonies, later condemning the iniquities
of the slave trade in one of the earliest novellas in English. Her life has
been marked by civil war, the execution of a king, the short-lived English
republic and the heavy hand of Puritan preachers, the licentiousness of the
Restoration, the Plague, the Great Fire of London, the
Anglo-Dutch Wars and the Glorious Revolution.