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.
The emotional outpouring of the early letters sounds unmediated; yet they are modelled on a style used in epistolary fiction by Behn
and Haywood
.
Literary responses
Sarah Chapone
SC
's friend and printer Richardson
saw her project in a different and far more simple light than she did: as the administering by a good woman of an antidote to the Poison shed by...
Literary responses
Martha Fowke
This notice compared Fowke to her advantage with both Orinda and Astrea (Katherine Philips
and Aphra Behn
), and added: When Love's thy Theme, no low Desire appears, / Chaste are thy Sighs, seraphick...
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...
Literary responses
Hannah Cowley
Anna Seward
included HC
among her seven celebrated Female Poets
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
59 (1789): 292
of the present day in April 1789. Recent critical comment on her includes an examination of her use of marriage law in...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Tipper
The volume is further prefaced by six poems in ET
's praise (or seven, counting the English translation of the one in Latin), all written by men. John Hallum
says she excels Behn
and Philips
Literary responses
Mary Hays
One of Jane Austen
's sisters-in-law owned a copy. Some reviewers objected both to content and arrangement. The European Review was not untypical in that although it expressed some admiration it also called for a...
Literary responses
Vita Sackville-West
VSW
probably hoped to challenge Woolf with her picture of a devil-may-care professional woman writer. But Woolf regarded Aphra Behn (when in its opening stages) as merely a straightforward task to keep one's machinery engaged...
Literary responses
Anna Maria Falconbridge
AMF
appears as a fictional character (at Freetown, Sierra Leone) in Lawrence Hill
's novel The Book of Negroes, 2007, perhaps more on account of her first husband's writing than her own.
Hill, Lawrence. The Book of Negroes. Black Swan.
423ff
Literary Setting
Sophia Lee
Matilda's narrative (addressed to a female friend) opens and dominates the novel. At first she and Ellinor believe that Mrs Marlow, the beautiful, elegant, and femininely helpless woman who brings them up, is their mother...
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...
Occupation
John Dryden
By this time Dryden's two careers as writer and dramatist were well launched. The first depended on his ability to please the Stuart court, and the second on his ability to please a theatre audience...
Occupation
Mary Wesley
During the first year of the Second World War MW
, like many women, got her first job. She did code-breaking as a civil servant with MI5
, and (like Aphra Behn
before her) filed...
Occupation
Marie-Catherine d' Aulnoy
Literary historian Paula McDowell
believes that MCA
worked as a spy for the French government (as Aphra Behn
did for the English).
McDowell, Paula. The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730. Clarendon.
263-4 and n88
Performance of text
Frances Boothby
FB
's Marcelia; or, The Treacherous Friend, a tragicomedy, was performed by the King's Company
at Bridges Street, Drury Lane, before Aphra Behn
began her theatrical career.
Milling, Jane. “’In the Female Coasts of Fame’: women’s dramatic writing on the public stage, 1669-71”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
7
, No. 2, pp. 267-93.
277
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Behn, Aphra. To Poet Bavius. Printed for the author, 1688.
