Aphra Behn

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.

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. The Histories and Novels of the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn (1696) states that Behn was born to Bartholomew Johnson, a barber, and Elizabeth Denham, a wet-nurse. 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 contemporary, Anne Finch, wrote that Behn was born in Wye in Kent, the "Daughter to a Barber". In some accounts the profile of her father fits Eaffrey Johnson. Although not much is known about her early childhood, one of her biographers, Janet Todd, believes that the common religious upbringing at the time could have heavily influenced much of her work. She argued that, throughout Behn's writings, her experiences in church were not of religious fervour, but instead chances for her to explore her sexual desires, desires that will later be shown through her plays. In one of her last plays she writes, "I have been at the Chapel; and seen so many Beaus, such a Number of Plumeys, I cou'd not tell which I shou'd look on the most...".

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. She is said to have been betrothed to a man named John Halse in 1657. 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. Her correspondence with William Scot, son of parliamentarian Thomas Scot, in the 1660s seems to corroborate her stories of her time in the American colony.

Although Behn's writings show some form of education, it is not clear how she obtained the education that she did. It was somewhat taboo for women at the time to receive a formal education, Janet Todd notes. Although some aristocratic girls in the past had been able to receive some form of education, that was most likely not the case for Aphra Behn, based on the time she lived. Self-tuition was practised by European women during the 17th century, but it relied on the parents to allow that to happen. She most likely spent time copying poems and other writings, which not only inspired her but educated her. Aphra was not alone in her quest of self-tuition during this time period, and there are other notable women, such as the first female medical doctor Dorothea Leporin who made efforts to self-educate. 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. During this trip Behn said she met an African slave leader, whose story formed the basis for one of her most famous works, Oroonoko. It is possible that she acted as a spy in the colony. There is little verifiable evidence to confirm any one story. In Oroonoko, Behn gives herself the position of narrator and her first biographer accepted the assumption that Behn was the daughter of the lieutenant general of Surinam, as in the story. There is little evidence that this was the case, and none of her contemporaries acknowledge any aristocratic status. Her correspondence with Thomas Scot during the time of her stay in Surinam seems to provide evidence for her stay there. Also, later in her career when she found herself facing financial troubles in the Netherlands, her mother is said to have had audience with the King in an attempt to secure Aphra's way home, implying there may have been some form of connection with aristocracy, however small. There is also no evidence that Oroonoko existed as an actual person or that any such slave revolt, as is featured in the story, really happened.

Writer Germaine Greer has called Behn "a palimpsest; she has scratched herself out," and biographer Janet Todd noted that Behn "has a lethal combination of obscurity, secrecy and staginess which makes her an uneasy fit for any narrative, speculative or factual. She is not so much a woman to be unmasked as an unending combination of masks". Her name is not mentioned in tax or church records. During her lifetime she was also known as Ann Behn, Mrs Behn, agent 160 and Astrea.

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. He died or the couple separated soon after 1664; however, from this point the writer used "Mrs Behn" as her professional name. In correspondence, she occasionally signed her name as Behne or Beane.

Behn may have had a Catholic upbringing. She once commented that she was "designed for a nun," and the fact that she had so many Catholic connections, such as Henry Neville who was later arrested for his Catholicism, would have aroused suspicions during the anti-Catholic fervour of the 1680s. 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. Behn was dedicated to the restored King Charles II. As political parties emerged during this time, Behn became a Tory supporter.

By 1666, Behn had become attached to the court, possibly through the influence of Thomas Culpeper and other associates. She has also been placed in Westminster, in lodgings close to Sir Philip Howard of Naworth, supporting the idea that it was his connections to John Halsall and Duke Ablemarle that led to her eventual mission in the Netherlands. The Second Anglo-Dutch War had broken out between England and the Netherlands in 1665, and she was recruited as a political spy in Antwerp on behalf of King Charles II, possibly under the auspices of courtier Thomas Killigrew. This is the first well-documented account we have of her activities. Her code name is said to have been Astrea, a name under which she later published many of her writings. Her chief role was to establish an intimacy with William Scot, son of Thomas Scot, a regicide who had been executed in 1660. Scot was believed to be ready to become a spy in the English service and to report on the doings of the English exiles who were plotting against the King. Behn arrived in Bruges in July 1666, probably with two others, as London was wracked with plague and fire. Behn's job was to turn Scot into a double agent, but there is evidence that Scot betrayed her to the Dutch.

Behn's exploits were not profitable, however; the cost of living shocked her, and she was left unprepared. One month after arrival, she pawned her jewellery. King Charles was slow in paying (if he paid at all), either for her services or for her expenses whilst abroad. Money had to be borrowed so that Behn could return to London, where a year's petitioning of Charles for payment was unsuccessful. It may be that she was never paid by the crown. A warrant was issued for her arrest, but there is no evidence it was served or that she went to prison for her debt, though apocryphally it is often given as part of her history.

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. While she is recorded to have written before she adopted her debt, John Palmer said in a review of her works that, "Mrs. Behn wrote for a livelihood. Playwriting was her refuge from starvation and a debtor's prison." 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.

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.

In the 1680s, she began to publish prose. Her first prose work might have been the three-part Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, anonymously published between 1684 and 1687. The novels were inspired by a contemporary scandal, which saw Lord Grey elope with his sister-in-law Lady Henrietta Berkeley. 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.

Behn composed Oenone to Paris, a reworking of Ovid's Heroides, for John Dryden and Jacob Tonson's collection Ovid's Epistles Translated by Several Hands, published in 1680. Unlike other entries to the collection, Behn significantly deviated from her source, incorporating motives from more of Ovid's epistles, 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.

She also translated from the French, publishing translations of Tallement, La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle and Brilhac. The two translations of Fontenelle's work were: A Discovery of New Worlds (Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes), a popularisation of astronomy written as a novel in a form similar to her own work, but with her new, religiously oriented preface; and The History of Oracles (Histoire des Oracles). She translated Brilhac's Agnes de Castro. 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).

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. Three posthumous collections of her prose, including a number of previously unpublished pieces attributed to her, were published by the bookseller Samuel Briscoe: The Histories and Novels of the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn (1696), All the Histories and Novels Written by the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn (1698) and Histories, Novels, and Translations Written by the Most Ingenious Mrs. Behn (1700). Greer considers Briscoe to have been an unreliable source and it's possible that not all of these works were written by Behn.

Until the mid-20th century Behn was repeatedly dismissed as a morally depraved minor writer and her literary work was marginalised and often dismissed outright. In the 18th century her literary work was scandalised as lewd by Thomas Brown, William Wycherley, Richard Steele and John Duncombe. Alexander Pope penned the famous lines "The stage how loosely does Astrea tread, Who fairly puts all characters to bed!". In the 19th century Mary Hays, Matilda Betham, Alexander Dyce, Jane Williams and Julia Kavanagh decided that Behn's writings were unfit to read, because they were corrupt and deplorable. Algernon Swinburne quotes her poetry with respect in his Essay on Blake (1866). She also attracted positive responses from Leigh Hunt, William Forsyth and William Henry Hudson.

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.

The Forc'd Marriage (performed 1670; published 1671)

Abdelazer (performed 1676; published 1677)

The Debauchee (1677), an adaptation, attribution disputed

The Counterfeit Bridegroom (1677), attribution disputed

The Young King (performed 1679; published 1683)

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)

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 History of the Nun: or, the Fair Vow-Breaker (1689)

Prose posthumously published, attribution disputed

Ovid: "A Paraphrase on Oenone to Paris", in John Dryden's and Jacob Tonson's Ovid's Epistles (1680).

Paul Tallement: A Voyage to the Island of Love (1684), published with Poems upon Several Occasions. Translation of Voyage de l'isle d'amour.

La Rochefoucauld: Reflections on Morality, or, Seneca Unmasqued (1685), published with Miscellany, Being a Collection of Poems by Several Hands. Translation of Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morale (1675 edition)

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: The History of Oracles (1688). Translation of Histoire des Oracles.

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.

Croft, Susan ed. (2019). Classic Plays by Women. London: Aurora Metro Books. ISBN 9781906582005. Features "The Rover".

Duffy, Maureen (1977). The Passionate Shepherdess. The first wholly scholarly new biography of Behn; the first to identify Behn's birth name.

Goreau, Angeline (1980). Reconstructing Aphra: a social biography of Aphra Behn. New York: Dial Press. ISBN 0-8037-7478-8.

Goreau, Angeline (1983). "Aphra Behn: A scandal to modesty (c. 1640–1689)". In Spender, Dale (ed.). Feminist theorists: Three centuries of key women thinkers. Pantheon. pp. 8–27. ISBN 0-394-53438-7.

Hughes, Derek (2001). The Theatre of Aphra Behn. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-76030-1.