Aphra Behn - WikiHQ

Aphra Behn (; bapt. 14 December 1640 – 16 April 1689) was an English playwright, poet, prose writer and translator from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors. Rising from obscurity, she came to the notice of Charles II, who employed her as a spy in Antwerp. Upon her return to London and a probable brief stay in debtors' prison, she began writing for the stage. She belonged to a coterie of poets and famous libertines such as John Wilmot, Lord Rochester. Behn wrote under the pastoral pseudonym Astrea. During the turbulent political times of the Exclusion Crisis, she wrote an epilogue and prologue that brought her legal trouble; she thereafter devoted most of her writing to prose genres and translations. A staunch supporter of the Stuart line, Behn declined an invitation from Bishop Burnet to write a welcoming poem to the new king William III. She died shortly after.

She is remembered in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own: "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." Her grave is not included in the Poets' Corner but lies in the East Cloister near the steps to the church.

Her best-known works are Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave, sometimes described as an early novel, and the play The Rover.

Life and work

Versions of her early life

Information regarding Behn's life is scant, especially regarding her early years. This may be due to intentional obscuring on Behn's part. One version of Behn's life tells that she was born to a barber named John Amis and his wife Amy; she is occasionally referred to as Aphra Amis Behn. Another story has Behn born to a couple named Cooper. Colonel Thomas Colepeper, the only person who claimed to have known her as a child, wrote in Adversaria that she was born at "Sturry or Canterbury" to a Mr Johnson and that she had a sister named Frances.

Another version of her life says she was born as Aphra Johnson, daughter to Bartholomew and Elizabeth Johnson of Harbledown in Kent; her brother Edward died when he was six and a half years old. It is suggested that this association with the Halse family is what gave her family the colonial connections that allowed them to travel to Suriname. In some of her plays, Aphra Behn shows disdain towards this English ideal of not educating women formally. She also, though, seemed to believe that learning Greek and Latin, two of the classical languages at the time, was not as important as many authors thought it to be. She may have been influenced by another writer named Francis Kirkman who also lacked knowledge of Greek or Latin, who said "you shall not find my English, Greek, here; nor hard cramping Words, such as will stop you in the middle of your Story to consider what is meant by them...". Later in life, Aphra would make similar gestures to ideas revolving around formal education.

Behn was born during the buildup of the English Civil War, a child of the political tensions of the time. One version of Behn's story has her travelling with a Bartholomew Johnson to the small English colony of Surinam (later captured by the Dutch). He was said to die on the journey, with his wife and children spending some months in the country, though there is no evidence of this.

Career

thumb|A sketch of Aphra Behn by [[George Scharf from a portrait believed to be lost (1873)]]

Shortly after her supposed return to England from Surinam in 1664, Behn may have married Johan Behn (also written as Johann and John Behn). He may have been a merchant of German or Dutch extraction, possibly from Hamburg. She was a monarchist, and her sympathy for the Stuarts, and particularly for the Catholic Duke of York may be demonstrated by her dedication of her play The Second Part of the Rover to him after he had been exiled for the second time.

thumb|right|Portrait by [[Mary Beale]]

Forced by debt and her husband's death, Behn began to work for the King's Company and the Duke's Company players as a scribe. She had, however, written poetry up until this point. The theatres that had been closed under Cromwell were now re-opening under Charles II, plays enjoying a revival. Under Charles, prevailing Puritan ethics were reversed in the fashionable society of London. The King associated with playwrights that poured scorn on marriage and the idea of consistency in love. Among the King's favourites was the Earl of Rochester John Wilmot, who became famous for his cynical libertinism.

In 1613 Lady Elizabeth Cary had published The Tragedy of Miriam, in the 1650s Margaret Cavendish published two volumes of plays, and in 1663 a translation of Corneille's Pompey by Katherine Philips was performed in Dublin and London. Women had been excluded from performing on the public stage before the English Civil War, but in Restoration England professional actresses played the women's parts. In 1668, plays by women began to be staged in London.

Behn's first play The Forc'd Marriage was a romantic tragicomedy on arranged marriages and was staged by the Duke's Company in September 1670. The performance ran for six nights, which was regarded as a good run for an unknown author. Six months later Behn's play The Amorous Prince was successfully staged. Again, Behn used the play to comment on the harmful effects of arranged marriages. Behn did not hide the fact that she was a woman, instead she made a point of it. When in 1673 the Dorset Garden Theatre staged The Dutch Lover, critics sabotaged the play on the grounds that the author was a woman. Behn tackled the critics head on in Epistle to the Reader. She argued that women had been held back by their unjust exclusion from education, not their lack of ability. Critics of Behn were provided with ammunition because of her public liaison with John Hoyle, a bisexual lawyer who scandalised his contemporaries.

After her third play, The Dutch Lover, failed, Behn falls off the public record for three years. It is speculated that she went travelling again, possibly in her capacity as a spy.

By the late 1670s Behn was among the leading playwrights of England. During the 1670s and 1680s she was one of the most productive playwrights in Britain, second only to Poet Laureate John Dryden. Her plays were staged frequently and attended by the King. Behn became friends with notable writers of the day, including John Dryden, Elizabeth Barry, John Hoyle, Thomas Otway and Edward Ravenscroft, and was acknowledged as a part of the circle of the Earl of Rochester. Charles II eventually dissolved the Cavalier Parliament and James II succeeded him in 1685.

Final years and death

thumb|right|Title page of the first edition of [[Oroonoko (1688)]]

<!--In her last four years, Behn's health began to fail, beset by poverty and debt, but she continued to write ferociously, though it became increasingly hard for her to hold a pen.

As audience numbers declined, theatres staged mainly old works to save costs. Nevertheless,-->Behn staged The Luckey Chance in 1686. In response to the criticism levelled at the play, she articulated a long and passionate defence of women writers in the preface of the play when it was published in the following year. Her play The Emperor of the Moon was staged and published in 1687; it became one of her longest-running plays. At the time of publication, Love-Letters was very popular and eventually went through more than 16 editions before 1800.

She published five prose works under her own name: La Montre: or, the Lover's Watch (1686), The Fair Jilt (1688), Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave (1688), The History of the Nun (1689) and The Lucky Mistake (1689). Oroonoko, her best-known prose work, was published less than a year before her death. It is the story of the enslaved Oroonoko and his love Imoinda, possibly based on Behn's travel to Surinam twenty years earlier. and offering a more sympathetic portrayal of Oenone than is found in Ovid or other retellings of the myth. Behn's free style of translation led to attacks by her contemporaries, most notably Matthew Prior, who famously referred to her as 'blind Translatress Behn' in a markedly misogynistic critique of the work. As the collection's only female contributor, Behn's involvement in Ovid's Epistles presents an unusual incursion into the male-dominated field of classical translation, and it has been suggested that her contribution paved the way for more women to produce their own translations of the classics. In her final days, she translated "Of Trees" ("Sylva"), the sixth and final book of Abraham Cowley's Six Books of Plants (Plantarum libri sex).

She died on 16 April 1689, and was buried in the East Cloister of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on her tombstone reads: "Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be Defence enough against Mortality." She was quoted as stating that she had led a "life dedicated to pleasure and poetry."

Legacy and re-evaluation

Following Behn's death, new female dramatists such as Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix, Susanna Centlivre and Catherine Trotter acknowledged Behn as their most vital predecessor, who opened up public space for women writers. Greer considers Briscoe to have been an unreliable source and it's possible that not all of these works were written by Behn.

The life and times of Behn were recounted by a long line of biographers, among them Dyce, Edmund Gosse, Ernest Bernbaum, Montague Summers, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, George Woodcock, William J. Cameron and Frederick Link.

Of Behn's considerable literary output only Oroonoko was seriously considered by literary scholars. This book, published in 1688, is regarded as one of the first abolitionist and humanitarian novels published in the English language. In 1696 it was adapted for the stage by Thomas Southerne and continuously performed throughout the 18th century. In 1745 the novel was translated into French, going through seven French editions. It is credited as precursor to Jean-Jaques Rousseau's Discourses on Inequality.

In 1915, Montague Summers, an author of scholarly works on the English drama of the 17th century, published a six-volume collection of her work, in hopes of rehabilitating her reputation. Summers was fiercely passionate about the work of Behn and found himself incredibly devoted to the appreciation of 17th century literature. Felix Schelling wrote in The Cambridge History of English Literature, that she was "a very gifted woman, compelled to write for bread in an age in which literature... catered habitually to the lowest and most depraved of human inclinations," and that, "Her success depended upon her ability to write like a man." Edmund Gosse remarked that she was, "...the George Sand of the Restoration".

The criticism of Behn's poetry focuses on the themes of gender, sexuality, femininity, pleasure, and love. A feminist critique tends to focus on Behn's inclusion of female pleasure and sexuality in her poetry, which was a radical concept at the time she was writing. Like her contemporary male libertines, she wrote freely about sex. In the famous poem "The Disappointment" she wrote a comic account of male impotence from a woman's perspective. One critic, Alison Conway, views Behn as instrumental to the formation of modern thought around the female gender and sexuality: "Behn wrote about these subjects before the technologies of sexuality we now associate were in place, which is, in part, why she proves so hard to situate in the trajectories most familiar to us". Virginia Woolf wrote, in A Room of One's Own:

All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds... Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind but was of practical importance.

</blockquote>A statue to Canterbury born Aphra Behn was unveiled on 25 February 2025. In partnership with local organisations, Canterbury Christ Church University announced, in September 2023, plans for a year long celebration of Behn's connection to Canterbury which would involve talks, a one-woman show, walks, and exhibitions, some hosted within the Canterbury Festival.

Works

Plays

The Forc'd Marriage (performed 1670; published 1671)
The Amorous Prince (1671)
The Dutch Lover (1673)
Abdelazer (performed 1676; published 1677)
The Town-Fopp (1676)
The Debauchee (1677), an adaptation, attribution disputed
The Rover (1677)
The Counterfeit Bridegroom (1677), attribution disputed
Sir Patient Fancy (1678)
The Feign'd Curtizans (1679)
The Young King (performed 1679; published 1683)
The Revenge (1680), an adaptation, attribution disputed
The Second Part of the Rover (performed 1680; published 1681)
The False Count (performed 1681; published 1682)
The Roundheads (performed 1681; published 1682)
The City-Heiress (1682)
Like Father, Like Son (1682), lost play
Prologue and epilogue to anonymously published Romulus and Hersilia (1682)
The Luckey Chance (performed 1686; published 1687)
The Emperor of the Moon (1687)

Plays posthumously published

The Widdow Ranter (performed 1689; published 1690)
The Younger Brother, or, the Amorous Jilt (1696)

Poems and poetry collections

Poems upon Several Occasions (1684)
Miscellany, Being a Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1685)
A Miscellany of New Poems by Several Hands (1688)
A Congratulatory Poem to Her Sacred Majesty Queen Mary, upon Her Arrival in England (1689)

Prose

Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–1687), published anonymously in three parts, attribution disputed
La Montre: or, the Lover's Watch (1686), loose translation/adaptation of a novel by Bonnecorse
The Fair Jilt (1688)
Oroonoko (1688)
The History of the Nun: or, the Fair Vow-Breaker (1689)
The Lucky Mistake (1689)

Prose posthumously published, attribution disputed

Paul Tallement: A Voyage to the Island of Love (1684), published with Poems upon Several Occasions. Translation of Voyage de l'isle d'amour.
Paul Tallement: Lycidus; or, the Lover in Fashion (1688), published with A Miscellany of New Poems by Several Hands. Translation of Le Second voyage de l'isle d'amour.
Fontenelle: A Discovery of New Worlds (1688). Translation of Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1688)
Jean-Baptiste de Brilhac: Agnes de Castro, or, the Force of Generous Love (1688). Translation of Agnes de Castro, Nouvelle Portugaise (1688)
Abraham Cowley: "Of Trees" ("Sylva"), in Six Books of Plants (1689). Translation of the sixth book of Plantarum libri sex (1668).

In popular culture

Behn's life has been adapted for the stage in the 2014 play Empress of the Moon: The Lives of Aphra Behn by Chris Braak, and the 2015 play [exit Mrs Behn] or, The Leo Play by Christopher VanderArk. She is one of the characters in the 2010 play Or, by Liz Duffy Adams. Behn appears as a character in Daniel O'Mahony's Newtons Sleep, in Philip José Farmer's The Magic Labyrinth and Gods of Riverworld, in Molly Brown's Invitation to a Funeral (1999), in Susanna Gregory's "Blood On The Strand", and in Diana Norman's The Vizard Mask. She is referred to in Patrick O'Brian's novel Desolation Island. Liz Duffy Adams produced Or,, a 2009 play about her life. The 2019 Big Finish Short Trip audio play The Astrea Conspiracy features Behn alongside The Doctor, voiced by actress Neve McIntosh. In recognition of her pioneering role in women's literature, Behn was featured during the "Her Story" video tribute to notable women on U2's North American tour in 2017 for the 30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree.

Biographies and other writings

Croft, Susan ed. (2019). Classic Plays by Women. London: Aurora Metro Books. . Features "The Rover".
The first wholly scholarly new biography of Behn; the first to identify Behn's birth name.
A comprehensively researched biography of Behn, with new material on her life as a spy.
Janet Todd, Aphra Behn: A Secret Life. , 2017 Fentum Press, revised edition
A view of Behn more sympathetic and laudatory than Woolf's.
Only one section deals with Behn, but it served as a starting point for the feminist rediscovery of Behn's role.
Two chapters deal with Aphra Behn with emphasis on her character as a poet
Britland, Karen (2021). "Aphra Behn's First Marriage?". The Seventeenth Century, 36:1. 33–53.
Hilton, Lisa (2024). The Scandal of the Century. Michael Joseph, 352 pp.
Marsh, Patricia (2024). Three Faces. The Conrad Press. A novel based on the known facts of Behn's life.

Notes

References

External links

Aphra Behn Online: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830
Aphra Behn profile at the BBC
Profile at Encyclopædia Britannica
Profile at the Poetry Foundation
Aphra Behn's Grave, Westminster Abbey
University of Adelaide biography and etexts (a source for the list of works)
The Aphra Behn Society
The Aphra Behn Page
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830
Project Continua: Biography of Aphra Behn Project Continua is a web-based multimedia resource dedicated to the creation and preservation of women's intellectual history from the earliest surviving evidence into the 21st Century.