Aphra Behn

English novelist and playwright

• Born: July 10, 1640
• Birthplace: Kent, England
• Died: April 16, 1689
• Place of death: London, England

As the first commercially successful woman writer in England in the seventeenth century, Behn set an example for subsequent generations of female novelists and dramatists. Her contribution to English drama, prose, and poetry ranks alongside such contemporaries as John Dryden and William Congreve, and she is often credited as a leading figure in the emergence of the English novel.

Early Life

The early years of the life of Aphra Behn (AF-ruh BAYN) are not well documented and have been the subject of much speculation. A parish register in the town of Wye shows that one Aphara Amis was baptized in that town (in the county of Kent, England) on July 10, 1640, and it is likely that she was born the same year and in the same county. Aphara Amis probably became Aphra Behn. Very little about her parents is known, and most early biographers of Behn, unaware of the Wye baptismal record, established her maiden name as Johnson rather than Amis. One source indicates that Behn’s father was a barber, although other scholars have speculated that she was raised as a gentlewoman, since she appears to have been educated in several languages and literatures.

Sometime between the late 1650’s and the early 1660’s, Behn reportedly traveled to Suriname, which was at the time under British rule. Although even the fact of this trip is disputed, many detailed descriptions of the region appear in Behn’s own writings and have been adduced as evidence of her firsthand experience with British imperialism, a subject that she explored at length several years later in her most well-known novel. Behn’s husband (about whom almost nothing is known) died in 1665, leaving her with very little money. However, she was reasonably well-connected in the court of Charles II, and in 1666, she traveled to the Netherlands as a government spy in order to gather information about Colonel William Scott, the son of one of the regicides who had aided the deposition and beheading of Charles I.

Life’s Work

After returning to London in 1667, Behn began to establish herself in the English theater scene, and she soon began writing plays herself. In part, her venture into the commercial theater may have been a practical matter, since she had suffered serious financial problems upon returning from the Netherlands and was briefly placed in a debtors’ prison in 1667. In 1670, she unsuccessfully attempted to stage her first play, The Young King: Or, The Mistake (pr. 1679, pb. 1683), which she had begun composing while in Suriname some years before. The play was rejected by both of the two major commercial theaters in London. Her second play, The Forced Marriage: Or, The Jealous Bridegroom (pr. 1670, pb. 1671), was accepted by the Duke’s Theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and was first performed in December, 1670. Although the play ran for only six days, it was considered a success.

Behn enjoyed a prolific career as a London playwright throughout the next two decades. Her next play, The Amorous Prince: Or, The Curious Husband (pr., pb. 1671), was reasonably well received. Behn followed with a slew of other plays, including Abdelazer: Or, The Moor’s Revenge (pr. 1676, pb. 1677), The Town Fop: Or, Sir Timothy Tawdry (pr. 1676, pb. 1677), The Rover: Or, The Banished Cavaliers, Part I (pr., pb. 1677), The Debauchee: Or, The Credulous Cuckold (pr., pb. 1677), The Rover: Or, The Banished Cavaliers, Part II (pr., pb. 1681), The Lucky Chance: Or, An Alderman’s Bargain (pr. 1686, pb. 1687), The Emperor of the Moon (pr., pb. 1687), and The Widow Ranter: Or, The History of Bacon of Virginia (pr. 1689, pb. 1690). Most of Behn’s plays can be categorized as romantic comedies, and, like her male contemporaries, she often touched on themes of sexual adventure and marital disappointment. At the same time, her plays arguably gave greater attention to the status of women in English society, and some of Behn’s most memorable female characters are sharply critical of the limited options available to them.

Behn was arguably the first successful woman playwright in England, and she is often identified as the first woman to make a successful living from her writing. Her status as a woman in a male-dominated field, indeed, in a male-dominated society, made her conspicuous; Behn herself occasionally attributed much of the negative criticism of her works to the fact of her gender rather than to any inherent deficiency in her writing. In this attitude, she was probably correct. Contemporary theater critics often claimed that Behn’s plays were derivative almost to the point of plagiarism; however, it was a common and accepted practice among playwrights during the Restoration period to revise existing literary works and present them as “new” plays, and the criticism was seldom leveled at equally “guilty” male playwrights.

While Behn’s success in the theater was only moderate, however, she was highly regarded among London’s literary circles, and she developed a warm friendship with John Dryden, the preeminent poet of the Restoration period. Behn regularly composed poems throughout most of her adult lifetime, and no less than three collections of her poems and translations were published from 1684 to 1688. Much of her poetry was erotic or amorous in nature, such as “Voyage to the Island of Love” (1684) and “On Desire: A Pindarick” (1688), and Behn often inverted conventional poetic forms and established the female figure as the narrative speaker (and, consequently, the male figure as the object of desire). For example, one of Behn’s most well-known poems, “The Disappointment” (1684), has as its subject a woman’s reaction to an incident of male impotence. Other poems are more political in nature, such as “A Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet” (1689), and they often reveal her sympathies with Royalist politics.

In addition to her copious dramatic and poetic output, Behn achieved significant success with her prose writings. Her longest work, Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1683-1687), most likely falls into the category of romance, a literary genre that is typified by a long, frequently digressive narrative and often contains heroic or fantastic plots. At the end of her career, Behn published Oroonoko: Or, The History of the Royal Slave (1688), which is sometimes said to be the first English novel. The tale depicts a black African prince who is captured and transported to the colonial island of Suriname (where Behn had herself traveled) as a slave. Although the work is careful not to criticize British imperialism, which it at times in fact celebrates, it is nonetheless progressive in its treatment of race and gender issues. Arguably Behn’s most popular work, Oroonoko was widely read for several years after its publication, and it was adapted and performed on the London stage throughout the eighteenth century. Behn died on April 16, 1689, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Significance

From a historical perspective, Behn would be an important figure to study solely because she was one of the first English women to make a successful living on the basis of her writing. However, her dramatic, poetic, and prose works are worth reading as literary works in their own right and not merely because of the historical conditions of their production. The Rover, for example, stands as one of the wittiest Restoration comedies, and it is still regularly performed. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, moreover, a virtual subfield of literary criticism arose around Behn’s Oroonoko, much of it focusing on the issues of gender and British colonialism, topics which Behn’s novel uniquely places in dialogue with each other. The fact that this work anticipates the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century (as well as looking back to older romance, and even epic, traditions) makes it an indispensable work for persons studying the development of the modern novel.

Behn’s Major Works

1670

• The Forced Marriage: Or, The Jealous Bridegroom

1671

• The Amorous Prince: Or, The Curious Husband

1673

• The Dutch Lover

1676

• Abdelazer: Or, The Moor’s Revenge

1676

• The Town Fop: Or, Sir Timothy Tawdry

1677

• The Rover: Or, The Banished Cavaliers, Part I

1678

• Sir Patient Fancy

1679

• The Feigned Courtesans: Or, A Night’s Intrigue

1679

• The Young King: Or, The Mistake

1681

• The Rover: Or, The Banished Cavaliers, Part II

1681

• The Roundheads: Or, The Good Old Cause

1682

• The City Heiress: Or, Sir Timothy Treat-All

1683-1687

• Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (3 volumes)

1684

• Poems upon Several Occasions, with A Voyage to the Island of Love

1685

• Miscellany: Being a Collection of Poems by Several Hands (includes works by others)

1686

• La Montre: Or, The Lover’s Watch (prose and poetry)

1686

• The Case for the Watch (prose and poetry)

1686

• The Lucky Chance: Or, An Alderman’s Bargain

1687

• The Emperor of the Moon

1687

• Translation of Aesop’s Fables (with Francis Barlow)

1688

• Lycidus: Or, The Lover in Fashion (prose and poetry; includes works by others)

1688

• Agnes de Castro

1688

• The Fair Jilt: Or, The History of Prince Tarquin and Miranda

1688

• Oroonoko: Or, The History of the Royal Slave

1689

• The Widow Ranter: Or, The History of Bacon of Virginia

1689

• The History of the Nun: Or, The Fair Vow-Breaker

1689

• The Lucky Mistake

1696

• The Younger Brother: Or, The Amorous Jilt

1697

• The Nun: Or, The Perjured Beauty

1697

• The Lady’s Looking-Glass, to Dress Herself By: Or, The Art of Charming (prose and poetry)

1698

• The Adventure of the Black Lady

1698

• The Wandering Beauty

Bibliography

Carnell, Rachel K. “Subverting Tragic Conventions: Aphra Behn’s Turn to the Novel.” Studies in the Novel 31 (1999): 133-151. Analyzes Behn’s fiction in the context of her overall literary career. Carnell argues that, as in her poetry, Behn inverts standard literary conventions in order to undermine traditional models of male heroism.

Mendelson, Sarah Heller. The Mental World of Stuart Woman: Three Studies. Brighton, East Sussex, England: Harvester, 1987. Contains informative chapters on Behn’s literary career, with particular attention paid to the education and literary culture to which Behn would have had access. Bibliography.

Ortiz, Joseph M. “Arms and the Woman: Narrative, Imperialism, and Virgilian memoria in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.” Studies in the Novel 34 (Summer, 2002): 119-140. Reconsiders Behn’s contribution to the rise of the English novel with respect to modern critical theories on the relationship between colonialism and narrative. Particular attention is given to Behn’s use of classical literary sources as models for imperialism.

Todd, Janet. The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Probably the most comprehensive and detailed biography of Behn. This well-written study devotes significant attention to Behn’s nonliterary career as a government spy, yet it connects her activities in this area to her later career as a writer. Todd’s emphasis is generally on Behn’s political attitudes in relation to her cultural and social environment. Several illustrations, extensive bibliography.

Woodcock, George. Aphra Behn: The English Sappho. New York: Black Rose Books, 1989. A biography of Behn beginning with her travels to Suriname, this book also includes a long chapter on her activities as a government spy. Subsequent chapters are devoted to her career on the English stage and her publications of poetry and novels. Includes a short chronological bibliography of Behn’s published works.