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 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
Literary responses
Elizabeth Tipper
The volume is further prefaced by six poems in ET
's praise (or seven, counting the English translation of the one in Latin), all written by men. John Hallum
says she excels Behn
and Philips
Anthologization
Catharine Trotter
The ascription has been subject to some question, since the formerly accepted birthdate for CT
made her only fourteen at the time; the date established by more recent scholarship makes her approaching twenty.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
The volume,...
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
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...
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
Catharine Trotter
It was published the same year, dedicated to Lord Halifax
. Like Fatal Friendship, it carried commendatory verses by Lady Piers
which situate Trotter as an heir to both Behn
and Philips
.
Occupation
Mary Wesley
During the first year of the Second World War MW
, like many women, got her first job. She did code-breaking as a civil servant with MI5
, and (like Aphra Behn
before her) filed...
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.
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.
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.
This belief...
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...
Anthologization
Jane Wiseman
Also in 1701, before JW
's the play appeared, Abel Boyer
included in his Letters of Wit, Politicks and Morality several writings by her: letters (under the name of Daphne) to George Farquhar
and...
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.
