While Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister is not a well-known work, it remains crucial to the development of the novel. Many sources, including Ian Watt in his landmark work The Rise of the Novel (1957), credit Daniel Defoe as writing the first successful English novel with Robinson Crusoe (1719). Not discussed in nearly so grand an arena is the fact that Defoe found his models for early narrative fiction in 17th-century works by women, such as those by Behn. Her erotic Love Letters offered arguably the first roman à clef and the first epistolary novel, a half century before Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), generally credited as the first epistolary novel. Based on a contemporary sex scandal, the novel appeared in three parts and proved extremely popular.

While not historical fiction in the strictest sense of the term, it also featured her era’s famous political figures, including the Protestant duke of Monmouth, son to Charles II, who was executed in 1685 for an attempted overthrow of his Catholic uncle, James II. Like Behn’s other works, Love Letters features an elegant and witty fashioning of a sex-centered aristocratic world.

The plot mirrored the real-life scandal between Ford Lord Grey and his sister-in-law, Lady Henrietta. His wife, Lady Mary, daughter of the house of Berkeley, fell in love with James Scott, duke of Monmouth and the eldest illegitimate son of the deposed Charles II. While news items freely referenced the affair, Grey chose to ignore it in public. He may have gained his forbearance due to his own fixation on his wife’s younger sister, Henrietta. While legally his in-law, Henrietta was known as his sister in the custom of the times, and the suggestion of incest fueled gossip regarding the entire affair. Not only did Grey seduce Henrietta, he “eloped” with her in the middle of political turmoil in which he was a major player, mesmerizing the public.

The aristocratic Berkeley family had to advertise in the September edition of the 1682 London Gazette in order to locate and reclaim their daughter, an indignity for which they would not soon forgive Grey. They demanded a trial in which five accomplices were tried with Grey, four being found guilty. During the trial, Henrietta, although forbidden to speak in the patriarchal proceedings, declared that her family could not force her return, as she had married. Her husband proved to be one Mr. Turner, a servant to Lord Grey, who offered his master a convenient excuse for remaining close to Henrietta. A published transcript titled The Trial of Ford Lord Grey provided an excellent source for Behn’s book. The court may have encouraged the publication, knowing of Grey’s close involvement with Monmouth, who would soon rebel and attempt to wrest power from his uncle.

Although dedicated to King James, Behn closely followed Monmouth’s career, finding him fascinating. Handsome and emotional, he inherited his father’s strong physical presence and sexual appetites. She created the character Cesario based on Monmouth, who, in the end, presented a pitiful figure, led to his execution speaking of his mistress rather than of the legitimate Stuart power he represented. Other of Behn’s characters represent composites of real people. Her Tomaso had attributes of Thomas Armstrong, a famous rebel, as well as Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first earl of Shaftesbury, recently dead, who was Monmouth’s major supporter in his bid for the throne. Her Philander character represented Lord Grey, who retained his life following the rebellion only because he was able to pay a £40,000 ransom. Turner became the character Brilljard, and Henrietta became Silvia.

Behn produced the novel anonymously for reasons of personal safety, and it was never recognized publicly as hers during her lifetime. Two years following her 1689 death, Gerard Langbaine ascribed the work to Behn, based on some of her later works that bore similar passages to those of the novel. She introduces the work with a letter to Thomas Condon, a royalist and supporter of James II, in which she urges him not to be out of sorts with the dedication of the “Letters of a Whigg” to him, as Silvia proves a true Tory who only loves a “Whigg.”

The novel proved so erotic that one character in an Eliza Haywood novel fainted upon reading from it. In Behn’s version, adultery on the part of the two aristocratic lovers commodifies Silvia to the subject of an advertisement, reducing her to common status. As Behn writes to Condon, “youth and beauty” prove a “commodity” whose “value” is “rated by opinion and is at best a curious picture.”

The book quickly fell out of favor with the stricter moral codes that emerged in the 18th century and during the Victorian era. More important, 20th-century critics who turned to Richardson and Defoe for the origins of the novel ignored it. Deserving the charge of dramatic and narrative excess, the book does not appeal to modern tastes. Hyperbole haunts every page. For example, one letter from Silvia to Philander begins:

Oh, where shall I find repose, where seek a silent quiet, but in my last retreat the Grave! I say not this, my dearest Philander, that I do, or ever can repent my love, though the fatal source of all: For already we are betray’d, our race of joys, our course of stol’n [sic] delight is ended e’re begun.

It became important to feminist and women’s studies in the mid-20th century and remains available in print.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Todd, Janet. Introduction to Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, by Aphra Behn. Edited by Janet Todd. New York: Penguin Books, 1996, ix–xxxii.