The need for new plays was drastically curtailed and this, together with some political anxiety, may have silenced Behn for a time. In a letter probably of 1683, printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1836, she wrote to her publisher Jacob Tonson, ‘I have been without getting so long that I am just on the point of breaking, especially since a body has no credit at the playhouse for money as we used to have…’, although she did go on to produce more plays, the successful and darkly cynical The Lucky Chance and the popular farce The Emperor of the Moon. Never a frugal person, she gave generously to others, was famous for her ‘milk punch’ and evidently delighted in eating and drinking in pleasant company. In addition, as the 1680s progressed, she was increasingly in ill-health and needed money for doctors – presumably the fall on to the icy road described in the ‘Letter to Mr Creech at Oxford’ could not have helped her condition. In the letter quoted above she ended by asking an extra £5 for some work from her publisher and admitting, ‘I want extremely’; in 1685 she borrowed £6, offering her publisher as security.

Clearly she had to find other literary means for support to augment her play-writing. Given her knowledge of French it was probably inevitable that she should choose translation. Although she turned many French scientific and poetic works into English, she also based some of her poems on Latin originals while claiming in her verses to the young classical translator Thomas Creech to know nothing of the language. She also began at this time to produce her own short stories and novels, a few based on or inspired by French originals; they turned out to be some of the most innovative prose works of the seventeenth century.

The 1680s, a troubled political period which, like the Civil War decade of the 1640s, seems to have inspired more women than usual into print, saw some of Behn’s most erotic and complex writing. Probably she fell in love again at this time or perhaps her troubled relationship with Hoyle took a different turn, and her writings seem more anxious about female sexuality and its social context than her earlier ones. ‘On Desire’, which describes the ‘welcome plague’, and the voyeuristic first part of Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister probably date from these perplexed years. The last work shows, beyond the joy of sexual fulfilment, the misery of lost reputation and of the need for caution, that ‘debaucher of the generous heart’, when every impulse demands spontaneity. Other works reveal the absurdity as well as the pleasure of desire. Nothing about sexuality within culture is simple, as the baroque ‘To the fair Clarinda, who made Love to me, imagined more than Woman’ suggests, with its dualistic play on sex and gender.

In 1685 she was probably in her early forties (she had called the Duke of Monmouth’s mistress old at thirty) and satirists were mocking her faded charms, although the denigration was as conventional as praise for beauty. The political instability was intensifying; after Charles’s death, James became king and harshly suppressed the rising of his nephew Monmouth, whose sorry fate is charted in the novel Love-Letters with its rakish anti-hero based on a close and possibly false friend of Monmouth. In the political ferment Aphra Behn seems to have held on to her lifelong fantasy of a golden age of social and sexual frankness, which she somehow managed to associate with the far from frank royal brothers but which was more easily embodied in the society of the unsophisticated Indians in Oroonoko; in her golden-age vision there was no conventional shame and no libertine selfishness, and people lived without kings, hierarchy, religion, money, power and manipulative sex.

Holding to such a vision, Behn had no sympathy with a Whiggish view of political or economic progress and, as The Widow Ranter shows, no belief in the political abilities and rights of the common people, who in her view needed enlightened aristocrats to prevent their degenerating into a mob. She seems to have had no more sympathy with the Christian vision of redemption and afterlife; even her effort at paraphrasing the Lord’s Prayer manages to concentrate on earthly love more than divine, as the satirist Tom Brown later noted in his The Late Converts Exposed in 1690, in which he described her ‘strange fits of piety’ interrupted by Cupid. In several works she expressed rationalist scientific beliefs and she frequently came down on the side of philosophical freedom and scepticism. The two versions of the commendatory poem on Creech’s translation of Lucretius, the Greek philosopher often blamed with Epicurus for Restoration cynicism and libertinism, may suggest her views and the difficulty she encountered in holding publicly to them; the earlier published version used by Creech to preface his second edition of his translation in 1683 may have been tampered with by the anxious author, as seems to be suggested by a letter she wrote to the publisher Jacob Tonson: ‘As for Mr Creech, I would not have you afflict him with a thing can not now be helped, so never let him know my resentment.’ In her own printed version, Lucretian philosophy which, although not preaching atheism, did deny the afterlife and urge happiness as a goal of living, is equated with reason which here compels the mind beyond the dull oracles of ‘poor feeble faith’, called ‘the last shift of routed argument’; in Creech’s version, however, this reason only equals faith, which becomes ‘resistless’ instead of ‘dull’ and is termed ‘the secure retreat of routed argument’.

Despite the Indians of Oroonoko, there is not much of the pleasure-filled golden age in the fiction Aphra Behn wrote during these years, the spare short stories and the novel Love-Letters. These relate private and public lives and show an artificial self being constructed from narratives, representations and partial interpretations. Both the novel and The Fair Jilt, based on real events, chart the moral disintegration of women of ‘false but snowy arms’ who give in to what is originally an authentic sexual passion but which is soon superseded by passion for power and money pursued through sexual manipulation. In both these stories the moral disintegration is linked with a political one: in Love-Letters it becomes clear that the person who can betray a king will betray anyone, while in The Fair Jilt the noble, gullible Prince Tarquin is brought down by a wicked woman as, in many versions, was the royal martyr himself, Charles I, whose end on the scaffold was frequently blamed on the influence of his French queen, Henrietta Maria. Unlike Prince Tarquin, however, Charles I was not saved from the law by the people. Like the foolish Duke of Monmouth with his false royal credentials, rather than the truly royal Charles, the dubious ‘prince’ Tarquin also suffered a painful, bungled execution.

Both The Fair Jilt and Oroonoko were published in the revolutionary year of 1688 when James, at last the father of a legitimate son, was overthrown by the Whigs and Parliament. Both deal with kingship and aristocracy and both present essentially good men fooled and subdued by lesser people. Behind the cruelly killed black Oroonoko, with his European features, his courtly ways and anxiety over his unborn child, is again inevitably the figure of the martyred Charles I and more urgently of his son, the soon-to-be-betrayed James II, one of the ‘black’ (i.e. dark haired and complexioned) Stuarts, like Oroonoko called ‘Caesar’ in her poem on his coronation and like the slave anxious about the fate of his long-awaited son. Resembling Bacon in The Widow Ranter, Oroonoko is a rebel only in a debased world of law rather than honour, of communal expediency rather than personal integrity.

Much is rightly made of Oroonoko’s blackness and slave status, although he himself is a slave-owner, but, beyond the issue of colonialism and race, which were to become important themes in the eighteenth century, is the seventeenth-century theme of aristocracy. For Aphra Behn neither race nor gender creates the category of the Other, as both would come to do in the next age, and neither is as important as class, breeding and inherent nobility, which alone oppose the shoddy commercialization and commodification of values and feelings she saw around her in London. Fittingly, the Surinam of Oroonoko will, as her first readers must have realized, fall to the base and mercenary Dutch shortly after the story must have occurred; in the same way the Stuart kingdom of England, deprived of loyalty and nobility with the exit of the last legitimate ruler and his legitimate son, will fall to the Dutchman William of Orange. It was left to the playwright Thomas Southerne, who used both Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter to form his tragicomic play Oroonoko in 1695, to remove the specific historical reference and instead discuss slavery and its relation to the oppression of women, only a faint theme in Behn’s work.

The later parts of the novel Love-Letters and the short stories use the device of a narrator, a woman who is sometimes detached and sometimes involved, sometimes pitiless in her presentation and at others emotionally overwhelmed; occasionally she is even implicated, as in Oroonoko, where she blames herself for being silent about the plot to hold the hero, caught by her conflicting roles of sympathetic and powerless female and of politically influential European.