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.
AMF
appears as a fictional character (at Freetown, Sierra Leone) in Lawrence Hill
's novel The Book of Negroes, 2007, perhaps more on account of her first husband's writing than her own.
Hill, Lawrence. The Book of Negroes. Black Swan.
423ff
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
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
Elizabeth Inchbald
The plot of intrigue here, set in Madrid, suggests Aphra Behn
without the cross-dressing. A scholar has kept the existence of his young wife a secret: there follow a hue and cry, a threatened...
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
Susan Smythies
The novel offers in passing an amusing catalogue of an old-fashioned library, whose first items are heroic romances like Ibraham; Cassandra; Cleopatra [by Madeleine de Scudéry
and Gauthier de La Calprenède
]. Several...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
Like CG
's Cecil he is a dandy in love with his own looks, which in his case include his exceptionally small size (said to be about that of a full-grown mouse). Of concomitant beauty...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Wiseman
Her poems, full of character and ingenuity, spring from social interchange. The title piece is a longish, narrative, occasional poem, Sent with a Pair of China Basons
Wiseman, Jane. “A Fairy Tale, Inscrib’d, to the Honourable Mrs. W— With Other Poems (1917)”. Eighteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets, 1700-1740, edited by William Christmas, Pickering and Chatto, pp. 34-46.
The epigraph alerts the reader to expect an unusually disillusioned example of the voyage-to-the-island-of-love genre (previously written by Aphra Behn
and the future Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
). This novel begins, as did the two...
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.
128
Intertextuality and Influence
Maureen Duffy
The play takes a biographical approach, as Woolf
, from the vantage point of imminent death, looks back over her past life. The only two other characters are Vita Sackville-West
and Sigmund Freud
; Duffy...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maureen Duffy
Living her afterlife on Mount Parnassus, Duffy's Sappho
is familiar with women poets who have written in English: her favourite is Aphra Behn
.
Duffy, Maureen. “My Life with Aphra Behn”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
19
, No. 2.
244
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
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.
409
Just about everyone in the play loves Agnes, including...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ariadne
Ariadne says she is a young lady, who has had an Inclination . . . for Scribling from my Childhood.
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.
Her preface invokes both Behn
and Philips
. The play was published in 1696. In...
