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.
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...
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 Production
Margaret Cavendish
When a comedy by MC
's husband the Duke of Newcastle, The Humorous Lovers, was acted in 1667, many of the audience (including Samuel Pepys
and Aphra Behn
's lover Jeffrey Boys
) supposed...
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, 1998.
233
Textual Production
Catharine Trotter
That is, it was played by a company denuded (by the actors' walkout of autumn 1694) of the talents of Betterton
, Bracegirdle
, and Barry
, but invigorated a month or so earlier by...
Textual Production
Susanna Centlivre
Though SC
was good at French, this copy of Fontenelle may well have been the translation by Aphra Behn
.
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...
Textual Production
Ephelia
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...
Textual Production
Delarivier Manley
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)
, Mar. 1986, pp. 41-2.
41-2
The ascription of this tribute has become more credible with the revelation of DM
Textual Production
Catharine Trotter
It was published by 30 January 1696, as written by a Young Lady, with a dedication to Lord Dorset
and a commendatory poem by Delarivier Manley
which described CT
as the heir to both...
Textual Production
Sarah Chapone
SC
had an important role in George Ballard
's pioneering work of women's history and women's biography. She introduced him to an even more important influence, Elizabeth Elstob
; she helped in his research; and...
Textual Production
Eliza Haywood
Later editions increase the number of prefatory tributes. The sixth (a handsome publication with a two-colour title page) places first a poem of compliment by the young James Sterling
. Sterling presents EH
as a...
