GODS OF RIVERWORLD by Philip Jose Farmer

However, somewhat compensating for the handicap, she looked better than most women her age. She had all her teeth, possibly because she had spent the first part of her life in Surinam and the minerals in the foods there helped preserve them. Possibly heredity was partly her dental savior. She was, though short, long-legged, though the skirts of her time kept most from observing that. She had full buoyant breasts, which the dress of her time did not conceal. She had beautiful yellow hair and large blue eyes with thick black brows that set off a face that was very attractive despite her long nose and somewhat short lower jaw. She had great charm, and she had a will with the momentum of a carriage and six horses galloping downhill.

Moreover, she had determined that she would remain single. As she had once written: “Marriage is as certain a bane to love as lending is to friendship; I’ll neither ask nor give a vow.”

She also wrote:

According to the strict rules of honour, Beauty should still be the reward of love, Not the vile merchandize of fortune, Or the cheap drug of a church-ceremony.

She’s only infamous, who to her bed For interest takes some nauseous clown she hates; And though a jointure or vow in public Be her price, that makes her but the dearer whore….

Take back your gold, and give me current love, The treasure of your heart, not of your purse.

Despite which, she gave her heart to the wrong man, a barrister named John Hoyle, who ill-used her, took her love and money, gave her back mostly unfaithfulness and contempt, and came close to but did not quite succeed in breaking her heart. (Hoyle was murdered in a tavern brawl in 1692, after she had died. Frigate had told her of this.) “Hoyle was said by someone, I forget by whom, to be ‘an atheist, a sodomite professed, a cor-rupter of youth, and a blasphemer of Christ.’ “

“Socrates was also accused of all of that but the last,” Aphra had said. “I did not mind that he was that and much more. It was … he did not love me as I loved him … loved me not all except in the beginning.”

“What would you do now if you met him?” Frigate had said.

“I don’t know. I don’t hate him. Yet… perhaps I would kick him in the balls and then kiss him. Who knows? I hope I never see him again.”

Aphra became famous, or infamous, and she was dubbed Astraea after the star maiden of ancient Greek mythology, daughter of Zeus and Themis, or perhaps of Astraeus the Titan and Eos. Astraea, during the golden age, distributed blessings. But when the iron age began, she left earth in disgust, and the gods placed her among the stars as the constellation Virgo.

Great literary figures and their hangers-on and young playwrights and poets flocked to her court. Some of them were lucky enough to be her lovers.

“However, many men, as I’ve said, resented my success, and many critics condemned my plays because they were written by a woman. Damn their rum-soaked brains and wine-bleared eyes and poxrunny pricks, they said my plays were bawdy and obscene. So they were, but if a man wrote such, the carpers would not’ve opened their mouths. Why should bawdiness and obscenity be strictly a man’s preserve? Are women angels or Eves?”

Nevertheless, she made a fortune, which somehow boiled away under the pressure of her high living and generosity, and she had many lovers, though, as she said, not much true love from them. When she was forty-six, she suffered from the violent and painful attacks of arthritis which were to kill her.

“Though I think that the effects of the pox were as fatal, though more insidious.”

Though her writing hand hurt her and there were times when the pen slipped from her feeble grasp, she wrote furiously, and the novel that was to assure her a respectable place in English literature, Oroonoko, was published before she died. The sixteenth of April, 1689, her battle against prejudice, jealousy, gossip and the hatred of the puritanical and hypocritical was over.