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.
DM
seems the most likely author of an anonymous elegy on Aphra Behn
, published six days after her death.
Foxton, Rosemary. “Delariviere Manley and ‘Astrea’s Vacant Throne’”. Notes and Queries, Vol.
231 (new series 33: 1)
, pp. 41-2.
41-2
The ascription of this tribute has become more credible with the revelation of DM
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Delarivier Manley
It presents a report on the state of the world, or at least the nation, by the goddess Astrea or Justice, who in classical myth fled to heaven at the end of the Golden Age...
Textual Production
Delarivier Manley
DM
's To the Author of Agnes de Castro praised Catharine Trotter
as a successor both to Behn
and to Philips
.
McDowell, Paula. The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730. Clarendon.
233
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.
1: 120
intelligence, self-education, and Christianity, as well...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
said her work was modelled not on the tragedy by Catharine Trotter
(later Cockburn)—in which Trotter in turn had drawn on a story by Aphra Behn
—but on an old Portuguese chronicle
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
2: 68
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
They include a novel in five letters (Indamora to Lindamira), a verse-and-prose romance (The Adventurer), and poems in various pastoral and classical modes—epistles, lyrics, etc. The novel gives a voice to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
The emotional outpouring of the early letters sounds unmediated; yet they are modelled on a style used in epistolary fiction by Behn
and Haywood
.
politics
Hannah More
Her participation in a form of direct action (in a cause she had already supported in print) was a prelude to her more vigorous action, in a leadership role, in the cause of the English...
Literary responses
Hannah More
The death of such a revered character produced an instant backlash. Thomas de Quincey
(who had visited HM
unwillingly as a young man) attacked both her literary works and her character in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine...
Textual Production
Charlotte Nooth
His De la littérature des Nègres in its original form reflects internationalism, anglophilia, and perhaps even proto-feminism. The title-page quotes Mary Robinson
. The roll of honour of white activists for abolition and racial equality...
Occupation
Thomas Otway
TO
seems to have become an actor in or soon after 1670 and a playwright in 1675. As a young and very nervous actor he was assisted and encouraged by Aphra Behn
. She is...
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...
Textual Production
Katherine Philips
Lord Orrery
oversaw the sumptuous production; Joseph Ashbury
, actor and theatre manager, took the title role. KP
had written the play since her arrival in Dublin the previous year: she had at least one...
Author summary
Mary Pix
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...
