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.
"Aphra Behn" by J Fitter,1754-01-02.Retrieved from https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/circa-1675-english-dramatist-novelist-and-poet-aphra-behn-news-photo/51242118.
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
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...
The Case presents itself as a rendering of the truth for God to read, if nobody else. It depicts MC
according to several different fictional conventions. In youth she resembles the heroines of the Restoration...
Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies. Translator Carter, Elizabeth, Cave, 1739, 2 vols.
title-page
on the model of Fontenelle
's Plurality of Worlds (which Aphra Behn
had translated into English). Like Fontenelle, Algarotti casts a noble female...
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
Mary Robinson
To demonstrate, as well as arguing for, mental equality, MR
learnedly surveys the course of political and literary history. She honours many women writers of the past (Aphra Behn
and Susanna Centlivre
as well...
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...
Textual Features
Clara Reeve
CR
demonstrates the widest possible reading: from Homer
, Virgil
and Horace
(all revered) and Juvenal
and Persius
(used to prove that not all classical authors are admirable) through the heroic romances like those of...
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....
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, 1974.
1: 120
intelligence, self-education, and Christianity, as well...
Textual Features
Eliza Haywood
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, 1725.
49
Philenia settles under a false name...
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...
Textual Features
Eliza Haywood
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...
