Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Aphra Behn
-
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.
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
Elizabeth Griffith
EG
's collection recovers fiction of an earlier style than her own. It incorporates material from three English texts (besides the Behn
, they are Penelope Aubin
's The Noble Slaves, and some of...
Reception
Delarivier Manley
DM
's fears were realised when The Lost Lover was damn'd.
Manley, Delarivier. The Lost Lover. R. Bentley, F. Saunders, J. Knapton, and R. Wellington.
preface
She believed this to be due not to any lack of merit but to its being a Woman's Play.
Manley, Delarivier. The Lost Lover. R. Bentley, F. Saunders, J. Knapton, and R. Wellington.
preface
The text...
Reception
Sarah Gardner
George Colman
pursued his enmity against SG
for almost twenty years, twice staging at the Haymarket Theatre
farces in mockery of women dramatists which aim at her, and for each of which he was able...
Reception
Margaret Holford
The writer of the note which follows this play in The New British Theatre was not sure if it had ever been staged. The note maintained that the play's quality contradicted the common belief that...
Reception
Mary Oxlie
This work listed MO
as one of its Women among the moderns eminent for poetry. Phillips, nephew and pupil of John Milton
, seems quite interested in the existence of women poets. Others in his...
Reception
Julia Kavanagh
Jewsbury
, again reviewing in the Athenæum, called this work a pleasant contribution to the literature of the times.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
1826 (1862): 528
She continued (folding together the woman writer with her work in a...
Reception
Mary Pix
Richard Steele
in The Spectator lumped MP
with Behn
and other writing women as unlearned, skilled only in the luscious Way.
Greer, Germaine et al., editors. Kissing the Rod. Virago.
MP
, writing and publishing at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, was the most prolific female playwright since Behn
. Her comedies, full of fun and acute observation...
Author summary
Ephelia
The Restoration user of the name Ephelia
was a remarkably assured, forceful, and accomplished poet (as well as a playwright), although she left, outside her single printed collection (1679), only four poems extant: political broadsheets...
Author summary
Eliza Haywood
EH
was the most prolific novelist by number of titles (even ignoring those doubtfully ascribed) between Aphra Behn
and Charlotte Smith
. She also wrote poems, plays, periodicals, conduct books, translation, and theatre history. Her...
Author summary
Frances Boothby
FB
has the distinction of being the sole woman to have a play produced before Aphra Behn
, during the first decade of the restored London theatres. Her single extant poem concerns her play. She...
Author summary
Hannah Wolley
HW
predates Aphra Behn
in making a living by her pen, only in her case her seventeenth-century writings (on cooking, medicine, household skills, and general conduct) aimed to attract students to her other career, which...
