Esteemed as a writer in her own time, upon her death, Behn was buried in the East cloister of Westminster Abbey. In A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf wrote that all women should "let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."

      Although women had been writing for centuries, only a few women, such as Christine de Pizan (c.1364 - c.1431), had managed to earn their living by the pen. Indeed, only a few women had managed to earn an independent livelihood in any career. For the working class, there was plenty of work for women as washerwomen, brewsters, needleworkers, and the like, but then, as now, women were paid much less for their labor than men, and most women could not earn enough money to keep body and soul together. Women were forced to marry for their daily bread. For the rich and middle classes, only a few professions existed: governess and that's all I can think of at the moment. If the woman came from a Catholic family, she could take religious orders. Otherwise she was dependent on her family (her father, her brothers, or other close relatives), she married to establish her own family, or she became a courtesan or a prostitute.

      In this environment, Behn set out to become an independent woman who earned her living as a writer. Before Behn, women wrote sometimes for money to augment their family's income, sometimes for pleasure, sometimes to entertain themselves, their family, or their friends. Most women produced one or two major works, then ceased writing. A few, such as Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623 - 1673) who wrote 14 works between 1653 and 1668, produced a body of work. But after Behn, women would attempt to earn their livelihood by writing. At first there were few commercially successful women writers, and the act of women writing for pay was controversial. But as the eighteenth century closed, the trickle of successful women writers was becoming a torrent and by the end of the nineteenth century the torrent of women writers had become a flood. As Woolf noted almost a century ago, it is Aphra Behn who opened the door of opportunity for women to become writers. For opening a new profession for women in an era when women had very few opportunities to earn an independent, honest living Behn has been included on our list of the most influential women of the millennium.

      Her early life is shrouded in mystery, even the identity of her parents in unknown. Behn was possibly the Eaffry Johnson born to Bartholomew and Elizabeth Johnson in 1640 in Harbledon near Canterbury; in which case, her father was a barber. Somewhere along the line she became literate enough in French and Latin to produce English translations of works in those languages. How and where she acquired her education is unknown.

      She sailed to Surinam about 1663. The events she witnessed there would eventually be used in her work Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave (1688), one of the first books to treat Africans and African slaves in a positive light.

      She returned from the West Indies to England, possibly via new the American colony of Virginia, and married Mr. Behn whose identity is not firmly established - he may have been a seaman, a merchant, or a figment of Behn's imagination, dreamed up to give her the respectability of widowhood. Nevertheless, Aphra changed her last name to Behn, they stayed together only a short time, and Behn never again married. By 1666 Aphra was living in Antwerp and acting as a British spy. Since the British government was very slow in paying her salary, and being threatened with debtor's prison, Behn turned to writing to make a livelihood.

      Her works include at least 15 "novels" (short stories, really), a book of poetry, translations from Latin and French, and at least 17 plays, many of them comedies. Her best known works are her novel Oroonoko (1688) and the plays The Forc'd Marriage (1670), The Rover (1677), Sir Patient Fancy (1678), The Roundheads (1681), and The City Heiress (1682).

      Typical of the British Restoration writers, Behn's work was a reaction to the Puritan Commonwealth under Cromwell. Her writings and entertainment tended to be bawdy, boisterous, and filled with sexual innuendo. Attacked in her own time as a woman writer, like so many intellectual women even of our own time, Behn was accused of plagiarism and of having men's help in writing her works. The attacks against her as a woman writer left her with a feminist consciousness in that she was aware of the disabilities of women as a group. She repeatedly defended her ability to write and to excel in a "man's domain." She was also attacked for her frank portrayal of human sexuality and the games men and women play that revolve around sexuality, even though the themes were common among male writers of the time (and even though those works were financially successful) .

      With the change in literary tastes during and following the Glorious Revolution, her works lost favor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until she was nearly forgotten by the 20th century. Montague Sommers brought out an incomplete collection of her works in 1915; Vita Sackville West and Virginia Woolf admired her strongly. In the third quarter of the twentieth century, as women scholars looked for early women writers and as women in general became more comfortable frankly discussing morality and sexuality, Behn has slowly returned to her rightful prominence.

      Behn was not only first female English writer to write copiously for the stage, but she made major contributions to the development of the English novel with her detailed descriptions of the settings for her novels, with her exploration of new topics such as slavery, and with her ability to write a "moralizing novel," a novel which took a moral stand on an issue and used the story to address a moral issue, such as slavery or the subjugation of women. She also wrote some of the most acclaimed poetry of the period.

      Her works were not overtly feminist, indeed some even espoused the misogyny characteristic of the age. Yet, many had strong female characters, characters who often viewed life from a woman's vantage point. Yet, race and sex were not the primary categories into which she divided humanity: she broke humanity into categories along class lines. A contemporary of Locke and Newton, she was a staunch royalist, believing that only breeding and inherent nobility would oppose the shoddy commercialism and commodification of values she saw on the rise as feudalism gave way to free enterprise.

References

      Behn, Aphra, and Janet Todd (ed.), The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol 1, Poetry , Ohio State University Press, 1992

      Hussey, Mark, Virginia Woolf A-Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Writings, Oxford University Press, 1995

      "England," Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1994 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation

For More Information:

          Aphra Behn Society

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