Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Aphra Behn
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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 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 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
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
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
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
Anne Wharton
AW voiced, in To Mrs. A. Behn, On what she Writ of the Earl of Rochester, delight at Behn's fame and the honour it conferred on women.
Wharton, Anne. The Surviving Works of Anne Wharton. Editors Greer, Germaine and Selina Hastings, Stump Cross Books, 1997, http://BLC.
143
Wharton, Anne. “Introduction”. The Surviving Works of Anne Wharton, edited by Germaine Greer and Selina Hastings, Stump Cross Books, 1997, pp. 1-124.
61
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, 1958.
16
The...
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
Vita Sackville-West
VSW's biography Aphra Behn: The Incomparable Astrea appeared in the Representative Women series edited by Augustine Birrell.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
3: 408n1
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
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
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...
