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.
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
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
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
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
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
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Matilda Betham
Her attitudes and judgements are unfailingly interesting. She knows that Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
(whom she calls Mary Herbert), was not only a great encourager of letters but also herself an ingenious...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sarah Lady Piers
SLP
begins here by celebrating Orinda, that is Katherine Philips
. Orinda, she says, rose like the dawn or the morning star, a Champion for her Sex, but with a modesty and gentleness appropriate...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Jane Brereton
The book opens, like other posthumous collections, with a biographical memoir, in this case by JB
's daughter Charlotte, who reinforces the poet's own positioning of herself as Welsh, female, and modest. Envisaging potential hostility...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Jane Williams
JW
surveys the field diligently from the sixteenth century onwards. She insists in principle, however, that no artistic talent in a woman justifies the neglect of even the smallest act of domestic duty.
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.
This belief...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Julia Kavanagh
In this second work of women's literary history, JK
once again limits herself to the novel. Her canon comprises ten authors, from Aphra Behn
to Sydney Morgan
by way of Sarah Fielding
, Frances Burney
