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.
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...
Textual Production
Sarah Chapone
SC
had an important role in George Ballard
's pioneering work of women's history and women's biography. She introduced him to an even more important influence, Elizabeth Elstob
; she helped in his research; and...
Textual Production
Eliza Haywood
Later editions increase the number of prefatory tributes. The sixth (a handsome publication with a two-colour title page) places first a poem of compliment by the young James Sterling
. Sterling presents EH
as a...
Textual Production
Eliza Haywood
This play (based on Aphra Behn
's The Lucky Chance, 1686) was published soon afterwards.
Monthly Catalogue, 1723-1730. Gregg Press.
6 (1723-30)
It went through three London editions, an edition at Glasgow in 1757, and an adaptation and condensation...
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
.
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...
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
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sarah Josepha Hale
SJH
does in the main a fine job in her coverage of British women writers, having something to say even about the extremely obscure. Dorothea Primrose Campbell
, for instance (who was living in poverty...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Ephelia
Among the poems of praise, To Madam Bhen [sic] (then a not uncommon rendering of Behn) adapts from Cowley
's famous praise of Philips
the idea of uniting the Strong and Sweet.
Ephelia,. Female Poems on Several Occasions. James Courtney, 1679.
