Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. 1 The personal history of Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to earn her livelihood by author ship, is unusually interesting but very difiicult to unravel and relate. In dealing with her biography iters at different periods have rushed headlong extremes, and we now find that the pendulum swung to its fullest stretch. On the one hand, have prefixed to a collection of the Histories Novels, published in 1696, 'the Life of Mrs. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.