Sophie Gee

And we're in the moment in history of print history where it was relatively cheap to print off relatively large numbers of books pretty easily.

And these circulated in libraries and in private collections.

And so just a lot more people were reading.

So these novels tend to be about the kinds of experiences that women are having at the time.

And sort of unsurprisingly, the dominant form of experience is of threading their way through the quagmire, through the minefield that was the marriage market.

So who are the big names from this early period?

One of them you'll have heard, probably the others you won't have, Aphra Behn.

wrote Orinoco, which some people call the first novel.

It's set in colonial Suriname, where Aphra Behn herself may well have travelled.

Another of these women is Della Revere Manley, who published a book called The New Atlantis.

And the third is Eliza Haywood,

who published, among other things, a novella called Love in Excess, which came out the same year as Robinson Crusoe.

And all of these books are not so much Orinoco but Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, which is a slightly later book by Aphra Behn.

All of these books are Romana clay novels.

They're basically secret histories retelling notorious society scandals that were going on at the time and

They're often presenting women in a kind of hyper-sexualized way.

But what their hyper-sexuality is showing is that the women are in charge of the courts of Europe.

They are in charge of the weak men who are nominally at the center of power.

They're pulling the strings.

They're doing the seducing.