Novelist, playwright, poet, and Tory activist Aphra Behn was born near Canterbury, Kent, in the middle to late 1640s, of a Catholic fam-
Aphra Behn, English playwright, novelist, and Tory activist. Portrait by Sir Peter Lely. (Library of Congress)
Ily named Johnson. In 1663 the family traveled to Surinam, where according to Behn’s account in her autobiographical novel Oroonoko (1688), her father had been appointed “Lieutenant-General of Six and thirty Islands, besides the Continent of Surinam” by Lord Francis Willoughby. Her father died on the voyage, and Aphra remained in Surinam for several weeks awaiting a ship home, along with her mother, sister, and brother. Here she befriended the “royal slave” Oroonoko, whose story she recounted twenty-five years later. After her return to England, Aphra married an otherwise unidentified “Mr. Behn,” who died some time before 1666. As a young widow, Behn was sent by the courtier Thomas Killi-grew on an intelligence mission to Flanders in July 1666 as an agent in Lord Arlington’s secret service. Her assignment was to persuade William Scot, son of regicide Thomas Scot and a friend of Behn’s from her stay in Surinam, to provide military information against the Dutch. Although Behn later claimed that she had used Scot’s intelligence to give advance warning of the Dutch plan to sail up the Thames in 1667, at the time her reports were discounted and she ended up briefly in debtors’prison in 1668 (Cameron 1961).
Behn is best-known as the first Englishwoman to earn her living as a writer. During the 1660s Behn began to frequent court literary and theatrical circles. She counted among her friends such well-known literary figures as Dryden and the “theatrical” Howards, the earl of Rochester, poets Katherine Philips and Edmund Waller, playwrights Thomas Otway and Nahum Tate, as well as actors like Eleanor Gwyn. She also befriended lawyers from the Inns of Court like John Hoyle, a notorious bisexual and Whig sympathizer. During Behn’s lifetime, gossip alleged that Behn and Hoyle were romantically linked; after her death a series of “Love Letters to a Gentleman,” supposedly written to Hoyle, were printed at the end of the posthumous Histories and Novels (1696). Behn’s first published literary ventures were two plays, The Forc’d Marriage (1670) and The Amorous Prince (1671), and a miscellany of her own and her friends’ poetry and short prose pieces associated with the theater, entitled Covent Garden Drolery (1672). In twenty years she wrote seventeen plays under her own name, beginning with The Amorous Prince (written before 1670 but not published until 1683), and ending with two posthumous comedies, The Widow Ranter (1690) and The Younger Brother (1696). Several anonymous comedies have been attributed to Behn, including The Woman Turn’d Bully (1675), The Counterfeit Bridegroom (1677), and The Debauchee (1677), the latter two adapted from plays by Brome and Middleton. As a beneficiary of royal patronage and a secret Catholic, Behn became a strong supporter of the Tory cause during the political struggles of the 1680s. Her allegiance is clearly reflected in the plays, satirical verse, and short prose pieces she produced during this period, beginning with her comedy The Roundheads (1681). A lengthy political roman a clef, Love Letters Between a
Nobleman and his Sister (1684), was loosely based on the scandalous elopement of the Whig chief, Forde Grey, Lord Warke, with his sister-in-law Henrietta Berkeley.
Although Behn earned much of her income through her dramatic works, notably her greatest hit, The Rover (1677), she also produced poetry, short stories, novels, and various occasional pieces. In addition to her own writings, she edited four miscellanies of verse and prose and translated several popular works from the French, including Bernard de Fontenelle’s best-selling popular account of Newtonian science, Entretiens sur la Pluralite des Mondes (1686), under the English title A Discovery of New Worlds (1688). Oroonoko, or, the Royal Slave (1688), Behn’s most popular and widely known novel, was adapted posthumously for the stage by Thomas Southerne in 1696. Behn suffered ill health during the late 1680s, living just long enough to witness the triumphant ascendancy of the Whigs during the Glorious Revolution of 1688—1689. She died on 16 April 1689, five days after the coronation ofWilliam and Mary, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Sara H. Mendelson
See also Literary Culture and Women; Philips, Katherine;Theater and Women Actors, Playwrights, and Patrons.
Bibliography
Primary Work
Behn, Aphra. The Works of Aphra Behn. Edited by Janet Todd. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992.
Secondary Works
Cameron, William. New Light on Aphra Behn. Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 1961.
Hughes, Derek. The Theatre of Aphra Behn. London: Palgrave, 2001.
Mendelson, Sara. The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies. Chapter 3. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.
O’Donnell, Mary Ann. Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources.
2nd ed. Burlington, VT:Ashgate, 2004.
Todd, Janet. “Aphra Behn.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
World History
