Aphra Behn

APHRA BEHN  1640 - 1689

I first came across Aphra  in a book entitled “Female Playwrights of the Restoration.”¹  We are relatively used to female playwrights today, our longest running West End play is by  Agatha Christie.  In those days however it was a great novelty. During the Commonwealth (1649-1660) Cromwell and his puritans closed the theatres. With Charles II and the Restoration they reopened and playwriting flourished.  For the first time female actresses played female roles. 

Virginia Woolf writes “All women together  ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously, but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”   And – “with Mrs Behn we turn a very important corner on the road.  We leave behind….those solitary great ladies, who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight alone.  …..Mrs Behn was a middle class woman with all the plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and courage;  a woman forced by the death of her husband and some unfortunate adventures of her own to make her living by her wits.”²

Rather than being a “feminist” writer, Aphra earned her living by writing plays, novels and poetry and thereby scored a first for women. We know little of her personal life, born in Kent she probably spent some of her childhood in what is now Surinam, Dutch Guyana.  The surname may indicate marriage to a Dutchman.  At one time she was a spy for King Charles in the Netherlands at a time when we were at war with them.  Restoration writing is noted for its bawdy themes and language and Aphra was as good as the male writers in this although, because female, criticised for it.  This is why Virginia Woolf finds it strange but appropriate that she is buried in Westminster Abbey with the literary greats.

Predictably at first it was said that her work must have been written by a man, because no woman would be so capable. Otherwise it was rubbished because she was a woman.

In her collected works³ we find a play “The Rover” in which the central Cavalier character is wooed by Angellica Bianca, a courtesan and Hellena, a cross-dressing virgin. “The Widow Ranter” is the first drama to be set in the American colonies (Virginia).  Her novel “Oroonoko” is the first novel detailing the evils of slavery which she would have witnessed in Surinam and  written over a hundred years before Wilberforce’s anti-slavery legislation. Her play “The Feigned Courtesans” is dedicated to “Mrs Ellen Gwynn” i.e. Nell Gwynne, actress and mistress of Charles II. The king attended some of her plays.

George Woodcock has written a comprehensive account of Aphra, warts and all, acknowledging that much of her writing is excellent but some not.  His book is entitled “Aphra Behn – The English Sappho”.⁴    The blurb states that-    “Aphra Behn holds a unique place in history.  Pioneer of women’s emancipation, anticipator of abolitionism, advocate of free marriage,-….and author of some of the best songs and plays in English.”  His reference to Sappho reminds us of Aphra’s poetry.  About a critic she wrote –

Ah, rot it – ‘tis a woman’s comedy,

One, who because she lately chanced to please us,

With her damned stuff will never cease to tease us,

What has poor woman done that she must be,

Debarred from sense and sacred poetry?

1.       Female Playwrights of the Restoration     Ed. Paddy Lyons and Fidelis Morgan  1991

2.       A Room of One's own    Virginia Woolf 1929  p.64

3.       Aphra Behn   Penguin Classics  1992

4.       Aphra Behn  The English Sappho  George Woodcock  1989