Sappho, Hildegard von Bingen and Aphra Behn: an ancient Greek poet; a medieval abbess, composer and writer; and a Restoration playwright and spy. What do they have in common?

They are all represented in the National Library of Australia’s rare books collections.

The longer I spend with these collections, the more I realise how rich they are. They include the work of many of the great female writers of centuries past.

This is the first of a two-part taste of these rare books. It looks at women writers who lived from ancient times to 1700. The second part's focus will be books by their 18th-century counterparts.

While many of these works are available online or in your local bookshop's 'Classics' section, there is nothing quite like seeing these classics in the form they were printed centuries ago. (Speaking as someone who loves her paperbacks.) We tend to favour the latest edition or translation, which promises to present the most authentic and authoritative text, closest to the intention of the author. But what were these earlier versions the latest edition is improving upon? They are long forgotten in many cases. If lucky, a footnote or a line in a list of previous editions.

Called the 'tenth muse' by the philosopher Plato, Sappho is known for creating some of history's most beautiful poetry. Only a fraction survives. She lived in the late 7th and early 6th centuries BCE, mostly at Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesbos. An icon, her life and sexuality have always been debated. Yet it is clear that she was from an aristocratic family, she married and had a daughter, and had relationships with women. She spoke and wrote in the Aeolic dialect. Most of her poems were songs, to be performed accompanied by a lyre, a stringed instrument. She was known and quoted by the ancient Romans, and the Library of Alexandria (the great library of antiquity) had good collections of her work. Her writings were rediscovered in the Renaissance, and more in 1896 in excavations in el-Behnesa, Egypt (Oxyrhyncus in ancient times) and in the last couple of decades.

Writer Joseph Addison drew attention to Sappho, first in a couple of articles in his journal The Spectator in 1711, and then with this translation. Referring to the incomplete nature of Sappho's surviving work, he wrote in The Spectator, 'Among the mutilated poets of antiquity there is none whose fragments are so beautiful as those of Sappho.'

Only a small proportion of this book features Sappho's poems; the majority is the work of the ancient Greek lyric poet Anacreon. Addison includes a brief biography of Sappho's life.

German Benedictine abbess, composer and writer Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) is best known today for her music. Yet she also wrote extensively. In her lifetime, her best-known written work was her Scivias, about her religious visions, which she commenced in 1142 and completed in 1151 or 1152. A number of manuscript versions are known, most notably the Wiesbaden manuscript. It was copied from Hildegard's manuscript, with her knowledge, and completed after her death. Scivias is a truncation of the Latin words Sci vias Domini (Know the ways of the Lord) and was first printed in Latin in 1513.

The letters of Peter Abelard and Heloise are among history's great love letters. Abelard was one of the most prominent scholars and teachers of 12th-century Paris. Heloise or Eloise was his brilliant student. They became lovers, married and had a son they named Astrolabe, yes, after the scientific instrument. Her uncle did not approve of the match. Abelard became a monk; Heloise became a nun. Heloise's uncle had Abelard attacked and castrated. Heloise and Abelard wrote letters to each other. For many years, only a small number of long letters were known. Australian academic Constant J. Mews made headlines worldwide about finding more and published a book.

Moving forward 500 years, Dorothy Osborne's (1627–1694/5) letters to William Temple (1628–1698) are another among history's greatest love letters.

Katherine Philips (1632–1664) was an English poet with a puritan background and royalist sympathies.

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné (1626–1696), known as Madame de Sévigné, is widely regarded as the most erudite female French writer of the 17th century.

Most of her extraordinary correspondence was directed to her daughter, who after her marriage went to live in Provence. While some of her letters were known in the 17th century, they were first published in 1725 at first without the permission of her granddaughter. This edition was published in 1738.

Aphra Behn (1640–1689) was one of the most successful English playwrights of the 1670s and 1680s.

She was one of the first English women to earn her living by her pen, and her novel Oroonooko is one of the first. She was prolific, releasing a book of poems, 2 miscellanies, 17 plays, 6 translations and 2 works of fiction before her death in 1689. In the 1660s, Aphra Behn had worked as a spy for the King–Charles II–in Antwerp against the Dutch.