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.
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.
49
Philenia settles under a false name...
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....
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...
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
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...
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...
