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.
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
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
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
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
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...
Friends, Associates
Jane Wiseman
She was a friend and correspondent of George Farquhar
and the future Susanna Centlivre
; the fact that she addressed a poem to Aphra Behn
and that Abel Boyer
published letters by her may indicate...
Friends, Associates
Ephelia
If Ephelia's poems of compliment are taken to imply personal friendship, she may have been a friend of Aphra Behn
, whom she praises warmly and with polite humility about her own abilities in her...
Family and Intimate relationships
Lady Mary Wroth
LMW
seems to have borne this lover two children, William and Katherine Herbert, both of whom survived to adulthood. William may be the origin of the mysterious young knight, Fair Designe, in the second part...
Family and Intimate relationships
Elizabeth Singer Rowe
Thomas Rowe's writing expresses political attitudes which were not uncommon amongst the dissenting community. He wrote against tyrants, and against servility towards tyrants. He also wrote poetry.
Stecher, Henry F. Elizabeth Singer Rowe, the Poetess of Frome: A Study in Eighteenth-Century English Pietism. Herbert Lang.
110, 113ff
It may have been the poet...
Education
Elizabeth Boyd
EB
says nothing about how she learned the things she knew—an acquaintance with English literature, some history, and at least a smattering of French and Latin—but she may well have been largely self-taught. She often...
