Three Faces

'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.