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.
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.
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.
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 Production
Charlotte Nooth
His De la littérature des Nègres in its original form reflects internationalism, anglophilia, and perhaps even proto-feminism. The title-page quotes Mary Robinson
. The roll of honour of white activists for abolition and racial equality...
Textual Production
Clemence Dane
The tale of Covent Garden begins with Inigo Jones
's building there in the 1630s of the first London square, prototype for many more. CD
throws together a colourful account of its local characters and...
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...
Textual Production
Katherine Philips
Lord Orrery
oversaw the sumptuous production; Joseph Ashbury
, actor and theatre manager, took the title role. KP
had written the play since her arrival in Dublin the previous year: she had at least one...
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.
233
Textual Production
Maureen Duffy
MD
published The Passionate Shepherdess, a life of Aphra Behn
, which remained the best in the field for twenty years.
British Book News. British Council.
(1977): May insert
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Textual Production
Frances Burney
One work which either escaped the flames or was written soon afterwards was a translation, Entretien sur la pluralité des mondes par Monsieur de Fontenelle
. Murdered into English by Frances Burney.
Hemlow, Joyce. The History of Fanny Burney. Clarendon.
16
The...
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
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)
, pp. 41-2.
41-2
The ascription of this tribute has become more credible with the revelation of DM
Textual Production
Mary Pix
The satire is a response to the current flood of attacks on women; it has sometimes been attributed to Aphra Behn
.