Aphra Behn

Who2 Biography: Aphra Behn, Playwright

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Born: 1640
Birthplace: Near Canterbury, England
Died: 16 April 1689
Best Known As: 17th century English writer

Name at birth: Aphra Johnson

In the 1660s, Aphra Behn served as a spy in Belgium for King Charles II, who had just gained the throne of England after the rule of the Cromwells. By 1670 her first play was produced, The Forced Marriage, the first in a string of successful plays. During the remainder of her life she wrote plays, poems and novels, and is considered one of the first women professional writers in the English language.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Aphra Behn

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(born 1640?, Harbledown?, Kent, Eng. — died April 16, 1689, London) English dramatist, fiction writer, and poet. Her early life is obscure (as is her original surname), but she spent some of it in South America. She married a merchant named Behn probably in 1664; he died (or they divorced) soon after. Her best-known work, the short novel Oroonoko (1688), tells the story of an enslaved African prince; it influenced the development of the English novel. Her first play, The Forc'd Marriage, was produced in 1670, and her later comedies, such as the two-part The Rover (1677, 1681), were commercially successful. She was the first Englishwoman known to have earned her living by writing.

For more information on Aphra Behn, visit Britannica.com.

Biography: Aphra Behn

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English poet, novelist, and playwright Aphra Behn (c. 1640-1689) was the first of her gender to earn a living as a writer in the English language.

Aphra Behn was a successful author at a time when few writers, especially if they were women, could support themselves solely through their writing. For the flourishing London stage she penned numerous plays, and found success as a novelist and poet as well-and through much of her work ran a decidedly feminist strain that challenged society's restrictions upon women of her day. For this she was scorned, and she endured criticism and even arrest at times. Another similarly free-thinking female novelist of a more recent era, Virginia Woolf, declared that "all women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn," according to Carol Howard's essay on Behn in the Dictionary of Literary Biography,"… for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."

A Childhood in Kent

It is likely that Behn was the infant girl Eaffry Johnson, born in late 1640 according to baptismal records from the church of St. Michael's in Harbledown, a small village near Canterbury, England. This region of England, Kent, was a conservative, insular county during Behn's youth, but the English realm itself was anything but calm during her era; Behn's fortunes and alliances would be tied to the series of political crises that occurred during the seventeenth century, and her literary output drew from and even satirized the vying factions. First came a Civil War that pitted Puritans against King Charles I; the monarchy was abolished with the king's beheading in 1649. Until 1658 England was ruled by Puritan revolt leader Oliver Cromwell, and upon his death in 1658 the monarchy was restored; hence the term for the era in which Behn wrote, Restoration England.

Behn was likely the daughter of a barber and a wet-nurse, and through her mother's care for the children of local landed gentry, the Colepeppers, Behn probably had access to some educational opportunities. Literary scholars agree that Behn most likely left England as a young woman with her family in 1663 when her father was appointed to a military post in Surinam, on the northeast coast of South America. It was an arduous journey, and some evidence suggests that Behn's father did not survive the trip. In any event, Behn, her mother, and sister stayed on at the English settlement for a time until a return trip home was possible, and the experience provided the basis for her most famous literary work, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave.

Oroonoko in the Annals of English Literature

This novel, published only near the end of Behn's career in 1688, chronicles the tale of a cultivated, intelligent West African prince who speaks several European languages. He falls in love with a West Indian woman named Imoinda, who is also the lover of his grandfather, the king. Imoinda is sold into slavery, and Oroonoko is kidnapped by the English and brought to Surinam as a slave. Imoinda is also in Surinam and becomes pregnant by him. Oroonoko then leads a slave rebellion-an actual event from the era-but is captured, and falsely promised freedom for Imoinda and her unborn child. When this is rescinded, he kills her so she and his child will not fall into enemy hands, and dies by rather barbarous means in English hands at the conclusion. Some of the villains and heroes were actual names from the period, English men who held posts in Surinam before it became a Dutch colony.

Literary historians trace the development of realism in the novel back this 1688 volume. Realism is a literary style that uses real life as the basis for fiction, without idealizing it or imbuing it with a romantic bias, and it became prevalent in the nineteenth century. Behn's Oroonoko has also been termed groundbreaking for its depiction of the institution of slavery as cruel and inhumane, making it one of literary history's first abolitionist proclamations. Behn has been praised for her characterization of Oroonoko, a just and decent man who encounters some very cruel traits among his white enemies; critics point to him as European literature's first portrayal of the "noble savage."

Astrea the Spy

England's troubles with Holland played a decisive part in Behn's fortunes as a young woman. Following her return to England in 1664, she met and married a Dutch merchant by the name of Hans Behn. Though it has been hinted that her brief marriage may have been her own fiction-widows were more socially respectable than single women during her era-other sources indicate the unfortunate Hans Behn died in an outbreak of the bubonic plague that swept through London in 1665. Later, many of Behn's works satirized Dutch merchants, the cultural icons of the era when Holland was growing rich from trade and giving birth to the first class of savvy capitalists. Behn may have been well-off herself for a time, and became a favorite at the Court of Charles II for her ebullient personality and witty repartee.

But then Behn's fortunes took a turn for the worse. It appears that she suddenly became destitute-perhaps after her husband died-and in 1666 was summoned into the service of the King as an agent in the war against Holland. She went to Antwerp to renew contact with a former lover, William Scot, who was a spy in the city; Scot was an Englishman who was involved in an expatriate group who once again wanted to abolish the monarchy. Behn's mission was to get him to switch sides, and to send reports on behalf of Charles II back to England in invisible ink using the code name "Astrea." During her work as an infiltrator Behn learned of plans to annihilate the English fleet in the Thames and, in June of 1667, Dutch naval forces did so. Yet her English spymasters left her virtually abandoned in a foreign enemy nation with no money-for a woman in the seventeenth century, this necessitated a very distressing and extreme crisis. She probably borrowed a sum, managed to return to England, and still was unremunerated by Charles II. Her numerous pleading letters, which still survive, were met with silence. She landed in debtor's prison in 1668, but at this point someone paid her debt and she was released.

Writing as a Profession

It was at this juncture that Behn resolved to support herself. She moved to London, and took up writing in earnest-not a revolutionary act at the time for a woman, but to expect to make a living at it certainly was. In Behn's day, a woman possessed no assets, could not enter into contracts herself, and was essentially powerless. Financial support came from a woman's father, and then her husband. Some well-born women escaped such strictures by becoming mistresses; others did so by entering a convent. The Restoration was a somewhat debauched period in English history, however, and its libertine ways were well-documented. Behn's ambitions coincided with the revival of the London stage; the Civil War had darkened the city's already-famed theaters in the 1640s and the London plague further shuttered them, but as England regained stability Charles II re-instituted the two main companies. Behn began writing for one of them, Duke's Company at Dorset Garden, and her first play was produced in September of 1670. The Forc'd Marriage; or, The Jealous Bridegroom ran for six nights, a successful run, since playwrights usually went unpaid until the third evening's box-office take. The plot concerned a romantic comedy of errors, which was standard fare for the day.

Behn would pen a number of works for the stage over the next dozen years. Most were lighthearted tales of thwarted love and cavalier seduction. These included The Amorous Prince; or, The Curious Husband (1671); The Dutch Lover (1673), with its vicious caricature of a Dutch merchant; Abdelazer; or, The Moor's Revenge (1676); and her most successful play, The Rover; or, the Banish'd Cavaliers. This 1677 work is centered around an English regiment living in exile in Italy during the Cromwell era; one of its officers, Willmore, is the "rover" of the title, a libidinous sort for whom Behn seemed to have modeled on the similarly randy Charles II.

Found Fodder in Restoration Foibles

One of her final plays, The Roundheads; or, The Good Old Cause, was produced in 1682 and achieved notoriety for the way in which Behn's pen ridiculed a faction of republican parliamentarians. But Behn's strong opinions landed her in trouble that same year when she was arrested for writing a polemic on the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II's illegitimate son and claimant to the throne. This also coincided with a merging of London's two main theaters and a subsequent decline of the medium. Behn then turned to writing novels. One of her best-known works was published in three volumes between 1684 and 1687, and was based on an actual scandal of the time. Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister was a thinly-disguised fictional treatment of the antics of one Lord Grey, who in 1682 eloped with his wife's sister; Grey was a Whig, or anti-monarchist, and would go on to play a real-life role in other political machinations between the throne and Parliament.

Behn's other novels include The Lucky Chance; or, An Alderman's Bargain (1686); a 1688 tale of a clever and remorseless woman serving as a spy in Holland, The Fair Jilt; or, The History of Prince Tarquin and Miranda; and The History of the Nun; or, The Fair Vow-Breaker from the same year. This last work was Behn's fictional saga of Isabella, who breaks her vow of chastity, marries two men, and in the end slays them both. In the twilight years of her brief career, Behn earned a living from Latin and French translations, and also penned versions of Aesop's Fables and poetry-some of which was quite racy. Yet she still struggled financially, and historians surmise that her lack of funds forced her to submit to substandard medical care when her health began to decline, which only worsened the situation. During the winter of 1683-1684, she was involved in a carriage accident, and also may have been plagued by arthritic joints; from some of her letters it can be inferred that she was also suffering from some sort of serious illness that may have been syphilis.

Behn died on April 16, 1689. She was buried in the cloisters at Westminster Abbey, and her admirers paid for a tombstone with an epitaph that read: "Here lies a proof that wit can never be/Defence enough against mortality," which she probably penned herself. Behn's literary reputation then sunk into obscurity for the next few centuries, and in England's Victorian era she was vilified. In 1871 a collection of her works, Plays, Histories, and Novels of the Ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn, appeared in print, and the Saturday Review, a leading London periodical of the time, condemned it as a sordid assemblage. The reviewer noted that any person curious about the forgotten Behn and her infamous works will "find it all here, as rank and feculent as when first produced." It was not until well into the twentieth century that literary scholarship restored Behn's contribution to English letters. "Aphra Behn is worth reading," wrote her 1968 biographer Frederick M. Link, "not because she ends or begins an era, or contributes significantly to the development of a literary genre or to the progress of an idea, but because she is an entertaining craftsman whose life and work reflect nearly every facet of a brilliant period in English literary history."

Early life

The personal history of Aphra Behn, one of the first English women to earn her livelihood by authorship,^[1] is difficult to unravel and relate. Information regarding her, especially her early life, is scant, but she was almost certainly born in Wye, near Canterbury, on 10 July 1640 to Bartholomew Johnson, a barber, and Elizabeth Denham. The two were married in 1638 and Aphra, or Eaffry, was baptized on 14 December 1640. Elizabeth Denham was employed as a nurse to the wealthy Colepeper family, who lived locally, which means that it is likely that Aphra grew up with and spent time with the family's children. The younger child, Thomas Colepeper, later described Aphra as his foster sister. In 1663 she visited an English sugar colony on the Suriname River, on the coast east of Venezuela (a region later known as Suriname). During this trip she is supposed to have met an African slave leader, whose story formed the basis for one of her most famous works, Oroonoko. The veracity of her journey to Suriname has often been called into question; however, enough evidence has been found to convince most Behn scholars today that the trip did indeed take place.

Though little is really known about Behn’s early years, evidence suggests that she may have had a Catholic upbringing. She once admitted that she was "designed for a nun" and the fact that she had so many Catholic connections, such as Henry Neville who was later arrested, would certainly have aroused suspicions during the anti-Catholic fervor of the 1680s (Goreau 243). Her sympathy to the Catholics is further demonstrated by her dedication of her play "The Rover II" to the Catholic Duke of York who had been exiled for the second time (247).

Behn was firmly dedicated to the restored King Charles II. As political parties first emerged during this time, Behn was a Tory supporter. Tories believed in absolute allegiance to the king, who governed by divine right (246). Behn often used her writings to attack the parliamentary Whigs claiming "In public spirits call’d, good o’ th’ Commonwealth…So tho’ by different ways the fever seize…in all ’tis one and the same mad disease." This was Behn’s reproach to parliament which had denied the king funds. Like most Tories, Behn was distrustful of Parliament and Whigs since the Revolution and wrote propaganda in support of the restored monarchy (248).

Life in England, writing career, work as a spy

A sketch of Aphra Behn by George Scharf from a portrait believed to be lost.

Shortly after her return to England in 1664 Aphra Johnson married Johan Behn, who was a merchant of German or Dutch extraction. Little conclusive information is known about their marriage, but it did not last for more than a few years. Some scholars believe that the marriage never existed and Behn made it up purely to gain the status of a widow, which would have been much more beneficial for what she was trying to achieve. She was reportedly bisexual, and held a larger attraction to women than to men, a trait that, coupled with her writings and references of this nature, would eventually make her popular in the writing and artistic communities of the 20th century and present day.^[2]^[3]

By 1666 Behn had become attached to the Court, possibly through the influence of Thomas Culpepper and other associates of influence, where she was recruited as a political spy to Antwerp by Charles II. Her code name for her exploits is said to have been Astrea, a name under which she subsequently published much of her writings. The Second Anglo-Dutch War had broken out between England and the Netherlands in 1665.^[3] She became the lover to a prominent and powerful royal, and from him she obtained political secrets to be used to the English advantage.^[3]

Behn's exploits were not profitable, however, as Charles was slow in paying (if he paid at all) for either her services or her expenses whilst abroad. Money had to be borrowed for Behn to return to London, where a year's petitioning of Charles for payment went unheard, and she ended up in a debtor's prison. By 1669 an undisclosed source had paid Behn's debts, and she was released from prison, starting from this point to become one of the first women who wrote for a living. She cultivated the friendship of various playwrights, and starting in 1670 she produced many plays and novels, as well as poems and pamphlets. Her most popular works included The Rover, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, and Oroonoko. Amongst her notable critics was Alexander Pope, against whom she has been defended.

Aphra Behn died on 16 April 1689, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Below the inscription on her tombstone read the words: "Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be / Defence enough against Mortality."^[4] She was quoted as once stating that she had led a "life dedicated to pleasure and poetry."^[2]

Status among other writers throughout history

In author Virginia Woolf's reckoning, Behn's total career is more important than any particular work it produced. Woolf wrote, "All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."^[5]. After a hiatus in the 19th century, when both the writer and the work were dismissed as indecent, Behn's fame has now undergone extraordinary revival. She dominates cultural-studies discourse as both a topic and a set of texts.. Much early criticism emphasized her unusual status as a female writer in a male-dominated literary world; more recent criticism has offered more thorough discussions of her works. ^[6]

In an age of libertines, Behn undertook to proclaim and to analyse women's sexual desire, as manifested in her characters and in herself. She has since become a favorite among sexually liberated women, many of bisexual or lesbian orientation, who proclaim her as one of their most positive influences.

Today, the affinities between Behn's work and that of Romantic writers seem more pronounced than the different level of publicly acceptable discussion of sexuality.^[7] It has been written that "Behn's writings unveil the homosocial role of male rivalry in stimulating heterosexual desire for women and explores the ways in which cross dressing and masquerade complicate and destabilize gender relations. Behn also analyzes female friendships and, more rarely, lesbianism".^[7] One source of speculation has been the identification of Behn with some of her characters. For instance in The Rover, the similarity in names between Behn and the prostitute Angellica Bianca is interesting.

"I, vainly proud of my personal judgement, hang out the Sign of Angellica"

In several volumes of writings by author Janet Todd, Behn's explorations of some of the key issues in Romantic studies, such as the role of incestuous and homosocial bonding in romance, the correlations between racial and gender oppression, female subjectivity, and, more specifically, female political and sexual agency are detailed.^[7]

The noted critic Harold Bloom calls Behn a "fourth-rate playwright" and notes her resurgent popularity as a case of "dumbing down."^[8]

She appears as a fictional character in the Faction Paradox novel Newtons Sleep.

Her exploits as a spy, and the misuse of the intelligence she gathered is alluded to in Patrick O'Brian's novel Desolation Island.

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Aphra Behn’s writing is unique for its time because of her use of the narrator’s voice and her innovative use of visual deceptions in her plays. According to Dawn Lewcock, Behn’s narrative voice is "sometimes as the dispassionately passionate observer in Oroonoko, sometimes in an ironic aside with the implicit assumption of a common understanding with her readers, as in her shorter novels and longer poems" (66). She takes on a narrative voice that is characteristically her own by using a removed but somehow still involved narrator in Oroonoko and changing to a different, ironic voice in other works. For Francis F. Steen, Behn’s narration can be dangerously frank: "…Behn openly reveals what by rights should be the secrets of her trade. Must not her common readers be kept in the dark about this secret coalition between the author and state power? Is her openly professed loyalty tantamount to a betrayal?" (93) The possibility of rejection and failure is increased by her honesty in a matter that other playwrights of the time would not concede to the audience.

Behn’s plays were also novel because she used visual cues in a way that they had never before been used. Dawn Lewcock comments on this ingenuity, saying "What is unique to Behn is not only her appreciation of the visual effects of a performance but also the way that she uses this to affect the perceptions of the audience and change their conception and comprehension of her plots and/or her underlying theme as she wishes by integrating the theatrical possibilities into her dramatic structure" (66-67). Lewcock goes on to explain this with the mistaken identities present in The Amorous Prince where disguises play a crucial role in the plot of the play.

Behn's minor poetry, as collected in her Poems Upon Several Occasions (1684), is a veritable treasure-trove of her unabashed ideas about sexuality. These poems were written in the pastoral tradition, which she characterizes as specifically sexual. The world of the pastoral, which she fills with amorous shepherds and shepherdesses, creates for her a space in which to explore the nature and virtues of free love.

For example, "The Golden Age," which in many ways is a call to regress back to a state of peace, of quiescence, like during the reign of Elizabeth I. This time has been hyperbolically compared to the "Golden Age" of the ancients by the Elizabethans, and the name was used to describe both periods. Because the term is so steeped in history, politics, and lore, Ovid's description of the "Golden Age" seems necessary. From the Metamorphosis:

Golden, that first age, which, though ignorant of laws, yet of its own will, uncoerced, fostered responsibility and virtue; men had no fear of any punishment, nor did they read of threatened penalties engraved on bronze; no throng of suppliants trembled before the visage of a judge or sought protection from the laws themselves. As yet no pine tree on its mountaintop had been chopped down and fitted out to ship for foreign lands; men kept to their own shores ... without warfare, all the nations lived, securely indolent. No rake had been familiar with the earth, no plowshare had yet wronged her; untaxed, she gave of herself freely, providing all essentials." I.126-43

However, Behn does much more with the term "Golden Age." Saying that it refers to only a time of prosperity in English history or a mythic paradise is vastly insufficient. What Behn creates is a pastoral world of free love, where sexual play can occur in a place outside of the Court and society, untrammeled by the customs of politeness. It is an unbound place, without inhibition.

The pastoral has always been a form in which writers can explore the culture from which they depart. In "The Golden Age" (as in her other pastoral poems), all the joys, difficulties, and foibles of sexual love can be explored without consequence. The speaker inverts Ovid's "Golden Age" into a sort of lesbian paradise, where men are impotent, and where women reign. In Ovid, there were no agricultural practices: "no rake had been familiar with the earth." Behn uses the idea to conflate the image of the earth with the image of women. In Ovid the earth is being invaded, in Behn, it is women. The "stubborn plow" of a man had not made any "rude Rapes" with a woman. Women reproduce, though, without men's "Aids." Men's "snakes" are impotent, their "spightful venom" not being injected into women, leaving the "Nymphs" (the women) to "innocently play." In Ovid, the world is "without warfare"; in Behn, warfare is replaced with the conquest of men's bodies into women's. The world of politics, power, and sex are all combined into one masculine, heterosexual issue. The language she uses unifies all three by using words that combine elements from each, dissolving their definitions. This corrupt world is described using masculine terms and by employing symbolic imagery. There are no "Rapes, Invasions, Tyrannies" in her golden age; sex is not forced for "Glories name." These double meanings—linking sex and war—pepper the first half of the poem.

In Behn's golden age there is no such thing as deviant love, for "that was lawful all, that Pleasure did invite." Her imagined world is not strictly without men, but sex is entirely on women's terms. Women, in this world have complete sexual control and agency. In section 6, the maid gives only "kind Resistance" to the her male lover, who is able to perform only with the help of the gods. For her, "Trembling and blushing are no marks of shame, / But the effect of kindling Flame." The Shepherdess' lover does not "Rape" or "Invade" with his "Rough Plow," injecting her with "spightful venom," but is "permit[ed]" to "win the prize." Women have complete control—it is they who win.

The last section tells the purpose for imagining such a place. The speaker has been wronged, which prompted her to write the poem in reaction. The section has a distinct carpe diem feeling, indirectly urging "Sylvia" to accept her love, for, the speaker says, "when the fresh Roses on your Cheeks shall die ... Eternally will they forgotten lye." This poem rejects a strictly heterosexual social order in favor of including bisexual and homosexual love, reversing the household dynamic of female subordination to her male "counterpart."

Or take her poem, "The Disappointment." Her rejection of any sort of modesty—scandalous for a man, unthinkable for a woman—destabilizes the accepted norms of gender and sexuality of her time. In much of her poetry, Behn works to unmask sex from the oppression of censorship, separating it from respectability, to reveal it for what it truly is: a real life force that can (and must) be scrutinized as well as laughed about. In this way, her pastoral poetry, when read as a whole unit, is something akin to a discussion. By reversing, confusing, and confounding sexuality/gender, Behn liberates her young swains from traditional, conservative restraints. The pastoral is an ideal method of carrying out this liberation, though it itself presents many problems for Behn. The pastoral is a male-dominated tradition, making it difficult for her as a woman poet to write about her uninhibited sexuality. In "The Disappointment," Behn may be using the pastoral against itself, wielding its conventional tropes in such a way that it is rendered, quite literally, impotent. Gender roles are reversed, and the prototypical pastoral figure, the shepherd, cannot perform the one duty all his peers do in many other pastorals. As in "The Golden Age," in "The Disappointment" women are the active lovers, and men the passive. The attention shifts from male to female, from penis to vagina. It is Lysander who is the victim of himself, and Cloris who established dominance over her lover. This frees up space within the green world of the pastoral for Behn as a woman writer to express herself.

The poem is about male impotence—a common theme in Behn's poetry. In this comic tale, two pastoral lovers attempt to satisfy their lust to no avail. The title cleverly reflects the theme. If we dissect the word "disappointment" we get an ingenious pun in "dis-a-point-ment": the state of having one's "point" taken away. The state of each lover is given here: Cloris is "disappointed" while Lysander is "dis-a-point-ed."

These are just two examples of her hundreds of amorous poems, songs, ballads, and dialogues that fill Poems Upon Several Occasions. Behn's fierce courage as a poet, publishing her poems and prying into the exclusively androcentric sphere, is a testament to the audacity that today has made her among the most important Early Modern writers.

Bibliography

Plays

The Forced Marriage (1670)
The Amorous Prince (1671)
The Dutch Lover (1673)
Abdelazer (1676)
The Town Fop (1676)
The Rover, Part 1 (1677) and Part 2 (1681)
Sir Patient Fancy (1678)
The Feigned Courtesans (1679)
The Young King (1679)
The False Count (1681)
The Roundheads (1681)
The City Heiress (1682)
Like Father, Like Son (1682)
The Lucky Chance (1686) with composer John Blow
The Emperor of the Moon (1687)

Posthumously performed

The Widdow Ranter (1689)^[9]
The Younger Brother (1696)

Novels

The Fair Jilt
Agnes de Castro
Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684)
Oroonoko (1688)

Short Stories

The History of the Nun: or, the Fair Vow-Breaker (1688)

The Dumb Virgin: Or, The Force of Imagination (1700)

Poems

Love Armed (1677)

The Disappointment (Aphra Behn) (1680)

On Her Loving Two Equally (1682)

Poems upon Several Occasions (1684)

On Desire (1688)

To The Fair Clarinda, Who Made Love to Me, Imagined More Than Woman (1688)

References

Biographies and writings based on her life

Maureen Duffy (1977). The Passionate Shepherdess. The first wholly scholarly new biography of Behn; the first to identify Behn's birth name.
Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra: a social biography of Aphra Behn (New York: Dial Press, 1980). ISBN 0-8037-7478-8
Angeline Goreau. Aphra Behn: A scandal to modesty (c. 1640-1689) in Spender, Dale (ed.) Feminist theorists: Three centuries of key women thinkers, Pantheon 1983, pp. 8-27 ISBN 0-394-53438-7.
Derek Hughes (2001). The Theatre of Aphra Behn. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-76030-1.
Janet Todd (1997). The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0-8135-2455-5. a biography concentrating on the political activism of Behn, with new material on her life as a spy.
Vita Sackville-West (1927). Aphra Behn - The Incomparable Astrea. Gerald Howe. A view of Behn more sympathetic and laudatory than Woolf's.
Virginia Woolf (1929). A Room of One's Own. One section deals with Behn, but it is a starting point for the feminist rediscovery of Behn's role.
What Is Triumph in Love? with a consideration of Aphra Behn, Nancy Huntting

Other sources

Hobby, Elaine. Virtue of necessity: English women's writing 1649-88. University of Michigan 1989
Summers, Montague (ed.). Aphra Behn: Works. London 1913
Lewcock, Dawn. Aphra Behn studies: More for seeing than hearing: Behn and the use of theatre. Ed. Todd, Janet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
Steen, Francis F. The Politics of Love: Propaganda and Structural Learning in Aphra Behn's Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister. Poetics Today 23.1 (2002) 91-122. Project Muse. 19 Nov. 2007.^[10]
Todd, Janet. The Critical Fortunes of Aphra Behn. Columbia: Camden House, 1998. 69-72.

Footnotes

^ Montague Summers. The Works of Aphra Behn. London: William Heineman, 1913
^ ^a ^b 17thwomen
^ ^a ^b ^c Feminism and Women's Studies: Memoir of Aphra Behn
^ http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/images/behn_aphra.JPG
^ Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. 1928, at 65
^ Walters, Margaret. Feminism: A very short introduction. Oxford University 2005 at 24 (ISBN 0-19-280510-X)
^ ^a ^b ^c Review of Todd's edition of Behn's Works
^ Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Editorial / Opinion / Op-ed / Dumbing down American readers
^ Online etext
^ Project MUSE

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Aphra Behn

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Aphra Behn

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Aphra Behn

Portrait from University of Aberdeen
Works by Aphra Behn at Project Gutenberg
Aphra Behn's Grave, Westminster Abbey
University of Adelaide biography and etexts (a source for the list of works)
The Aphra Behn page at list-arts.net
The Sign of Angellica: An Aphra Behn Site
The Complete Works of Aphra Behn on e-book
Some of Behn's minor poems

Persondata
NAME	Behn, Aphra
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Author
DATE OF BIRTH	10 July 1640
PLACE OF BIRTH	England
DATE OF DEATH	16 April 1689
PLACE OF DEATH

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		Who2 Biography. Copyright © 1998-2008 by Who2, LLC. All rights reserved. See the Aphra Behn biography from Who2. Read more
		Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
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		British History. A Dictionary of British History. Copyright © 2001, 2004 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more
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		History 1450-1789. Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
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	Drama: English
	English Literature and Language
	The Forc'd Marriage (Sources) (play)

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	Themes and issues of the rover by aphra behn?
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