Читать книгу The Beckoning Dream - Paula Marshall - Страница 5

This novel, like all of mine, is firmly based on fact, and is dedicated to the memory of Aphra Behn, wit, poet, dramatist, novelist and secret agent, who lived the life of a free woman in the mid-seventeenth century—no mean achievement. It has taken three hundred years for her reputation to be revived and her many talents to be properly appreciated.

One of her greatest achievements as an agent in Holland was to warn the British Government in 1667 that the Dutch Navy was about to launch a major attack on the naval bases of Sheerness and Chatham on the River Medway. Her warning was ignored, as she recorded in her autobiography, and for three hundred years her biographers and critics mocked her for having claimed that, had the Government heeded her report, a major disaster for the British Navy would have been avoided.

Three hundred years later, Aphra’s claim was vindicated when her letter, giving details of the proposed attack, was discovered in the State Papers. In the same way, her right to be seen as the mother of the English novel and as the writer of a number of witty and actable plays was also derided until the Sixties of the present century when her work was looked at with fresh eyes.