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.
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
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
Susanna Centlivre
Though SC
was good at French, this copy of Fontenelle may well have been the translation by Aphra Behn
.
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.
3: 408n1
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
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
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
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, http://BLC.
143
Wharton, Anne. “Introduction”. The Surviving Works of Anne Wharton, edited by Germaine Greer and Selina Hastings, Stump Cross Books, pp. 1-124.
61
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
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...
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
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
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
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.
