Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Aphra Behn
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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 book was handsomely produced, having a decorated dedication page, and a frontispiece featuring an oval portrait (or fictitious portrait) of Ephelia, with a heraldic badge above the picture and a pedestal bearing her engraved...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Ephelia
Among the poems of praise, To Madam Bhen [sic] (then a not uncommon rendering of Behn) adapts from Cowley
's famous praise of Philips
the idea of uniting the Strong and Sweet.
Ephelia,. Female Poems on Several Occasions. James Courtney.
73
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...
Friends, Associates
Ephelia
If Ephelia's poems of compliment are taken to imply personal friendship, she may have been a friend of Aphra Behn
, whom she praises warmly and with polite humility about her own abilities in her...
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
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....
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...
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...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
Like CG
's Cecil he is a dandy in love with his own looks, which in his case include his exceptionally small size (said to be about that of a full-grown mouse). Of concomitant beauty...
Textual Production
Germaine Greer
GG
has published a good deal in her scholarly field of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women's writing. Her anthology (with Susan Hastings
, Jeslyn Medoff
and Melinda Sansone
), Kissing the Rod, has played an...
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...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Gunning
These are: The Wife with Two Husbands (from a tragi-comedy, never acted, by de Pixérécourt), Malvina (a recent novel, by Cottin, in sentimental and exclamatory style), and Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, the...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Behn, Aphra. To Poet Bavius. Printed for the author, 1688.
