On Restoration comedy, the women who wrote it, and the rare pleasure of watching a woman want something and get it.

In most of the stories we have inherited, a woman who wants is a woman who will be punished for it. She is the cautionary tale, the fallen one, the warning pinned up for other women to study. I wrote recently about Sade, who could only picture the desiring woman as a victim or a brute. He was not unusual in that. He was the rule.

And then, for about forty years, in the playhouses of Restoration London, the rule broke.

When Charles II returned to the throne in 1660 he reopened the theatres the Puritans had nailed shut, and he did something no English king had done before him. He let women onto the stage. For the first time the women in these plays were played by actual women, and the effect was electric and faintly dangerous. One of them, Nell Gwyn, went from the boards straight into the king’s bed and never once apologised for either.

But the part that holds me is not who stood on the stage. It is who was writing the words.

Aphra Behn was the first Englishwoman to earn her living by her pen. Spy, traveller, debtor, playwright, she wrote comedies that crackle with sex and money and scheming, and she refused, flatly, to moralise. Her women want. They want men, they want freedom, they want out of the marriages their fathers arranged for them, and in her plays, astonishingly, they often get it. They win not through virtue but through wit. They out-think every man in the room. Centuries later Virginia Woolf would say that every woman who writes owes her a debt, because Behn was the one who proved a woman could say what she liked and be paid for saying it.

She was not alone for long. By the 1690s a cluster of women were writing for the London stage, Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix, Catharine Trotter, mocked collectively as the Female Wits by men who found them threatening and wrote a whole play to say so. Susanna Centlivre came after them and outsold most of her male rivals for a generation.

This is what people mean, I think, when they call these comedies juicy. It is not only the adultery and the double meaning, though there is a great deal of both. It is the moral looseness. The refusal to tidy desire away into punishment. Vice is not corrected. Virtue is not rewarded with a husband and a lesson. The clever, appetitive woman simply wins, walks off the stage with exactly what she came for, and the audience is invited to delight in her rather than mourn her.

We lost that, mostly. The eighteenth century grew respectable and the desiring woman was folded back into her box, where she has spent most of the time since. But it existed. For one bright, bawdy stretch, written in no small part by women, she was not a warning at all. She was the heroine of the joke, and she was having a wonderful time.

I think about that more often than I let on.