ABSTRACT
Several of Behn's libertine heroines reject constraining people and institutions, such as marriage, regarding its limitations as the chief producers of grief in their lives. The 1680s, 1690s, and early 1700s saw a wave of new women writers, particularly for the stage, including Trotter, Sarah Fyge Egerton, Judith Drake, Mary Pix, and Susanna Centlivre, among others. Though many of the women writers who followed Behn shied away from the erotic themes that dominate Behns works, all of them were indebted to the legacy that her version of the female libertine left to them. The emergence of the novel helped to redefine the female libertine as an early character of sensibility that Behn particularly featured in her works. It was mainly contemporary and later women writers, however, some of whom imitated or invoked Behn for inspiration, who looked to the works of this first professional woman writer to create their heroines.
