Aphra Behn: The Incomparable Astrea

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The Emperor of the Moon: A Farce. As it is Acted by Their Majesties Servants, At the Queens Theatre (London: Printed by R. Holt for Joseph Knight & Francis Saunders, 1687). Kunitz, Stanley; Haycraft, Howard, eds. (1952). British Authors Before 1800: A Biographical Dictionary. New York: H.W. Wilson. p.36. The history of oracles, and the cheats of the pagan priests in two parts / made English". quod.lib.umich.edu . Retrieved 22 December 2021.

Given her mysterious upbringing, one theory says that Behn's past has a steamy secret. According to some, she may have been the highborn lovechild of John Johnson, a lieutenant general of Surinam, who she later spent time with as a young adult. Whatever the truth, people are always eager to attribute an extraordinary origin story to this peculiar writer. Forced by debt and her husband's death, Behn began to work for the King's Company and the Duke's Company players as a scribe. She had, however, written poetry up until this point. [7] While she is recorded to have written before she adopted her debt, John Palmer said in a review of her works that, "Mrs. Behn wrote for a livelihood. Playwriting was her refuge from starvation and a debtor's prison." [16] The theatres that had been closed under Cromwell were now re-opening under Charles II, plays enjoying a revival. Under Charles, prevailing Puritan ethics were reversed in the fashionable society of London. The King associated with playwrights that poured scorn on marriage and the idea of consistency in love. Among the King's favourites was the Earl of Rochester John Wilmot, who became famous for his cynical libertinism. [17] Sometime in the early 1980s I joined a queue outside a sci-fi bookshop in London to have my copy of The Magic Labyrinth signed by its author, the celebrated sci-fi writer Philip José Farmer. When I reached the head of the line, I asked him which of the many characters (the book features the entire human population being resurrected) was his favourite, expecting him to nominate Richard Burton, Alice Liddell (of Wonderland fame) or Mark Twain. But he hesitated, thought for a moment, and said: ‘It changes, but at the moment, I find myself fascinated by Aphra Behn.’ I wasn’t sure how to answer that. I had never even heard of this person (was this a man? A woman?). I mutely collected my inscribed copy and went home to read it. Eventually I came across the character and when she is introduced, Farmer gives a pithy and accurate summary of her importance: exit Mrs Behn] or, The Leo Play – Fringe Fest Event". Archived from the original on 21 January 2015.Amazing Aphra: a thoroughly modern feminist icon Journalist Rob Ryan delves into the fascinating yet little-known life of playwright Aphra Behn, the first English woman to make a living through writing, ahead of an intriguing exhibition at The Royal Exchange this month Aphra Behn, one of the most influential dramatists of the late 17th century, was also a celebrated poet and novelist. Her contemporary reputation was founded primarily on her "scandalous" plays, which she claimed would not have been criticized for impropriety had a man written them. Behn's assertion of her unique role in English literary history is confirmed not only by the extraordinary circumstances of her writings, but by those of her life history as well. As a woman, she was excluded from the sorts of institutions from which historians usually glean their records, such as Oxford and Cambridge, the Inns of Court, or the Middle Temple. If she'd been an aristocrat, there might have been records surviving at her country seat. If she'd been a religious non-conformist, she might have recorded her thoughts and ideas about her inner life in a spiritual journal, or diary, as so many women did. But as neither a man, nor an aristocrat, nor a nonconformist, she proves peculiarly resistant to biographical recovery.

Behn kept scandalous company. She was good friends with Charles II’s most popular mistress, the stage actress Nell Gwyn. a b Lizbeth Goodman; W.R. Owens (2013). Shakespeare, Aphra Behn and the Canon. Routledge. p.146. ISBN 978-1135636289. Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Behn, Aphra". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol.3 (11thed.). Cambridge University Press. Prologue to Romulus [single sheet with epilogue on verso] (London: Printed by Nath. Thompson, 1682); republished in Romulus and Hersilia; or, The Sabine War. A Tragedy Acted at the Dukes Theatre (London: Printed for D. Brown & T. Benskin, 1683).

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Goreau, Angeline (1983). "Aphra Behn: A scandal to modesty (c. 1640–1689)". In Spender, Dale (ed.). Feminist theorists: Three centuries of key women thinkers. Pantheon. pp. 8–27. ISBN 0-394-53438-7. Behn's contemporary reputation as a poet was no less stunning than her notoriety as a dramatist. She was heralded as a successor to Sappho, inheriting the great gifts of the Greek poet in the best English tradition exemplified by Behn's immediate predecessor, Katherine Philips . Just as Philips was known by her pastoral nom de plume and praised as "The Matchless Orinda," so Behn was apostrophized as "The Incomparable Astrea," an appellation based on the code name she had used when she was Charles's spy. Behn spent the last year of her life looking to the stars. In 1688, she translated a French popularization of astrology into A Discovery of New Worlds. Of course, she put her own twist on the work by turning the text into a novel and giving her own introduction.

The criticism of Behn's poetry focuses on the themes of gender, sexuality, femininity, pleasure, and love. A feminist critique tends to focus on Behn's inclusion of female pleasure and sexuality in her poetry, which was a radical concept at the time she was writing. Like her contemporary male libertines, she wrote freely about sex. In the infamous poem " The Disappointment" she wrote a comic account of male impotence from a woman's perspective. [22] Critics Lisa Zeitz and Peter Thoms contend that the poem "playfully and wittily questions conventional gender roles and the structures of oppression which they support". [39] One critic, Alison Conway, views Behn as instrumental to the formation of modern thought around the female gender and sexuality: "Behn wrote about these subjects before the technologies of sexuality we now associate were in place, which is, in part, why she proves so hard to situate in the trajectories most familiar to us". [40] Virginia Woolf wrote, in A Room of One's Own: Hutner, Heidi, ed. (1993). Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism. University of Virginia Press. p.2. ISBN 978-0813914435. Krueger, Misty, Diana Epelbaum, Shelby Johnson, Grace Gomashie, Pam Perkins, Ula L. Klein, Jennifer Golightly, Alexis McQuigge, Octavia Cox, and Victoria Barnett-Woods. Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843, 2021. Internet resource. Todd, Janet; Todd, Professor of English Literature Janet (28 March 1996). Aphra Behn Studies. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-47169-5. O'Donnell, Mary Ann. Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. 2nd Edition. Ashgate, 2004.Her best-known works are Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave, sometimes described as an early novel, and the play The Rover. [6] Life and work [ edit ] Versions of her early life [ edit ] Lizbeth Goodman; W.R. Owens (2013). Shakespeare, Aphra Behn and the Canon. Routledge. p.142. ISBN 978-1135636289. a b Lizbeth Goodman; W.R. Owens (2013). Shakespeare, Aphra Behn and the Canon. Routledge. p.145. ISBN 978-1135636289. One of Behn’s biggest post-mortem defenders was 20th-century writer Virginia Woolf. Woolf reserved a defense of Behn in her own magnum opus, A Room of One’s Own, writing that "it was she who earned [women] the right to speak their minds."