Aphra Behn

14 December 1640 - 16 April 1689

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.

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Connections

Connections Sort ascending	Author name	Excerpt
Literary responses	Hannah More	The death of such a revered character produced an instant backlash. Thomas de Quincey (who had visited HM unwillingly as a young man) attacked both her literary works and her character in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine...
Intertextuality and Influence	Ariadne	Ariadne says she is a young lady, who has had an Inclination . . . for Scribling from my Childhood. qtd. in Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990. Her preface invokes both Behn and Philips . The play was published in 1696. In...
Intertextuality and Influence	Penelope Aubin	Having related his marriage in Lady Lucy, PA is forced (rather like Behn opening The Second Part of the Rover or Defoe opening Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe) to begin her sequel with...
Intertextuality and Influence	Susanna Centlivre	The allusion to Aphra Behn is deliberate. SC 's correspondents included George Farquhar . Bowyer, John Wilson. The Celebrated Mrs Centlivre. Duke University Press, 1952. 19, 24ff
Intertextuality and Influence	Catharine Trotter	CT was adapting Aphra Behn 's short novel Agnes de Castro; or, The Force of Generous Love, 1688. She did not acknowledge her borrowing. Greer, Germaine et al., editors. Kissing the Rod. Virago, 1988. 409 Just about everyone in the play loves Agnes, including...
Intertextuality and Influence	Susanna Centlivre	This play owes something to Behn 's The Feigned Courtesans, 1679. Its action is supposed to be taking place during a single night, entirely in the dark. It abounds, even beyond what was common...
Intertextuality and Influence	Delarivier Manley	It presents a report on the state of the world, or at least the nation, by the goddess Astrea or Justice, who in classical myth fled to heaven at the end of the Golden Age...
Intertextuality and Influence	Catharine Trotter	It was published the same year, dedicated to Lord Halifax . Like Fatal Friendship, it carried commendatory verses by Lady Piers which situate Trotter as an heir to both Behn and Philips .
Intertextuality and Influence	Jane Barker	JB opens this work with a nostalgic glance backward at about sixty-six years of political thinking and literary writing. Her dedication To the Ladies is immensely engaging. She takes up the story of Galesia, now...
Intertextuality and Influence	Hannah Cowley	The action is set in Madrid. The title reverses the gender roles of Susanna Centlivre 's A Bold Stroke for a Wife. Of the paired heroines, Victoria reclaims her faithless husband, Carlos, by...
Intertextuality and Influence	Mary Russell Mitford	MRM said her work was modelled not on the tragedy by Catharine Trotter (later Cockburn)—in which Trotter in turn had drawn on a story by Aphra Behn —but on an old Portuguese chronicle Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers, 1870, 2 vols. 2: 68
Intertextuality and Influence	Elizabeth Thomas	Both poems concern female friends: one is an elegy on Cecilia Bew , the other a friendship poem to Susan Dove , which expressly imitates Aphra Behn . Dryden, John. The Letters of John Dryden: With Letters Addressed to Him. Editor Ward, Charles E., Duke University Press, 1942. 128
Intertextuality and Influence	Elizabeth Beverley	The title-page further develops the ship image of the title into a full-blown allegory, a kind of commercialised version of the voyages to an island of love depicted by Madeleine de Scudéry , Aphra Behn
Intertextuality and Influence	Hannah Cowley	This time HC based herself on Aphra Behn : on The Luckey Chance. Her play does not resemble Congreve's The Mourning Bride. Set in Portugal, it traces the unsuccessful attempts of one...
Intertextuality and Influence	Lady Mary Wortley Montagu	They include a novel in five letters (Indamora to Lindamira), a verse-and-prose romance (The Adventurer), and poems in various pastoral and classical modes—epistles, lyrics, etc. The novel gives a voice to...

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