Aphra Behn

14 December 1640 - 16 April 1689

Standard Name: Behn, Aphra

Birth Name: Aphra Johnson

Married Name: Aphra Behn

Pseudonym: Astrea

Used Form: A. B.

Used Form: Mrs A. Behn

Used Form: Mrs Behn

Used Form: Mrs A. Behn, the author of the Rover

Used Form: author of the Voyage to the Isle of Love

Used Form: by the Same Hand

It is difficult to summarise AB 's immense and complex importance for the history of women's writing. Virginia Woolf said she deserved from all women a tribute of flowers because she was the first to bring together writing and earning. In fact only two professional (as opposed to amateur) dramatists of either sex (Dryden and Shadwell ) emerged before her on the Restoration stage. Theatrical writing (mostly comedy) supported her for the major part of her career as one of the period's most prolific and popular dramatists. Her poems and translations are also significant in the story of those genres. Later she pioneered the important new forms of novella and full-length epistolary novel. She exploited to the full a raunchy period during which social criticism clothed itself naturally in sex comedy; her gender made her a belated partaker in the academic rediscovery and rehabilitation of the Restoration age.

Full profile

Connections

Connections Sort ascending	Author name	Excerpt
Textual Features	Delarivier Manley	The text belongs to a genre well-known in France as the chronique scandaleuse, and popularised in England through the writings of Madame d'Aulnoy (who had been much translated, and had already influenced DM ). It...
Textual Features	Anne Finch	Although AF is often thought of as a writer of pastoral, on account of the fame of A Noctural Reverie, this mode is fairly rare in her work. She is a very social poet....
Textual Features	Harriet Martineau	As a character, Toussaint is highly idealised. He is distinguished from other slaves by lineage (an African royal grandfather like that of Behn 's Oroonoko before him), Martineau, Harriet. The Hour and the Man. AMS Press, 1974. 1: 120 intelligence, self-education, and Christianity, as well...
Textual Features	Eliza Haywood	Fillamour, having eloped with Philenia and spent their first night at a bagnio, is still unhappy at the prospect of living a mean and obscure life when married. Haywood, Eliza. The Unequal Conflict. J. Walthoe and J. Crokatt, 1725. 49 Philenia settles under a false name...
Textual Features	Muriel Spark	Spark's introduction speculates about the neglect of Mary Shelley, suggests as possible cause the fact that no single, facile cliché can encapsulate her, and puts forward a witty and trenchant list of the clichés to...
Textual Features	Eliza Haywood	The author deliberately confuses her or his identity: a fictional correspondent cites contradictory opinions as to whether it is EH , or some other daughter of Behn or Manley , or a man dissimulating his...
Textual Features	Robert Southey	Against the trend of the times, RS aimed for historical interest rather than literary canonicity, compiling in his Specimens of the Later English Poets a collection of representative voices rather than a garland: The taste...
Textual Features	Barbara Hofland	The title-page quotes James Montgomery . The story, set in the seventeenth century, opens as Iwanowna marries Frederic Moldovani on her nineteenth birthday. News of his death closes the first volume; but tragedy is held...
Textual Features	Elizabeth Boyd	EB offers original, discriminating praise for women's writing: Susanna Centlivre (her inspiration, she says), Eliza Haywood (though she regrets her exposure of women's faults), Aphra Behn , and Delarivier Manley , whom she calls the...
Textual Features	Edith Sitwell	The English edition appeared the following year. Her choice for inclusion is, as usual, idiosyncratic. She begins well before Chaucer , with anonymous early religious poems in which may be heard, she writes, the creaking...
Textual Features	Phebe Gibbes	In addition to its over-riding themes of colonialism and the marriage market, this novel, set in early British Calcutta (and incorporating a good deal of travel book material), is much concerned with literature and with...
Textual Features	Anna Seward	The sonnets are written in strict Milton ic form. One of their favourite themes is love of nature and the countryside; one or two deal with Seward's love for Honora Sneyd . In rendering Horace...
Textual Features	Frances Hodgson Burnett	On her fifteenth birthday Clorinda, responding to advice from the local curate, announces that she is going to change her sex from male to female. She stages her own metamorphosis, leaving the room in breeches...
Textual Features	Muriel Jaeger	MJ here relates the lives of five people who succeeded in living according to [c]oherent schemes of human behaviour, putting into practice their own theories of the good life. Cato (The Stoic) and George Sand...
Textual Features	Anne Wharton	AW 's To Mrs. A. Behn likens her to Sappho .

Timeline

27 October 2009

In Washington, DC, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Washington Shakespeare Company together launched a Sort-of-Jane-Austen Play Reading Festival presenting women playwrights.

“Sort-of-Jane Austen Play Reading Festival”. Washington Shakespeare Company.

10 March 2021

Torrey Peters became the first trans woman to be longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, for her novel Detransition, Baby.

“Torrey Peters on the Women’s Prize 2021 Longlist”. Serpent’s Tail, 10 Mar. 2021, https://serpentstail.com/2021/03/10/torrey-peters-on-the-womens-prize-2021-longlist/.

Texts

Behn, Aphra. The Works of Aphra Behn. Editor Todd, Janet, William Pickering, 1992, 7 Vols.

Behn, Aphra. The Young King. Brown, Benskin and Rhodes, 1683.

Behn, Aphra. The Younger Brother. J. Harris, 1696.

Behn, Aphra. To Poet Bavius. Printed for the author, 1688.

Behn, Aphra. “To the Unknown Daphnis on his Excellent Translation of Lucretius”. De Natura Rerum, translated by. Thomas Creech, 2nd ed., Anthony Stephens, 1683, p. d3r - e2r.