Behn, Aphra (c. 1640–1689)

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BEHN, APHRA (c. 1640–1689)

BEHN, APHRA (c. 1640–1689), English writer. Aphra Behn was the first female writer to produce a substantial dramatic canon and was also an innovator in prose fiction, and a highly accomplished poet. The details of her early life are unclear. Recent scholarship has concluded that she was probably baptized at Harbledown, near Canterbury, Kent, on 14 December 1640, the daughter of Bartholomew Johnson, a barber, and Elizabeth (née Denham). Her mother seems to have been employed as wet nurse to Sir Thomas Culpepper, who may have provided Behn with an introduction to the nobility and an entry into royalist circles.

Behn indicates in several of her works that she spent time in Surinam during her youth or early adulthood. Although posthumous accounts of her life claim that her father was appointed governor there, it seems more likely that she made her own way, perhaps in service or as a spy or agent. Returning to England around 1664, Behn married a man later described as "a merchant of Dutch extraction." The marriage seems to have been brief, and Behn's shadowy husband may have died in the savage outbreak of plague that took hold of London in 1665–1666.

A clearer picture of her career emerges only in the mid-1660s. In August 1666 Behn was sent to Antwerp on a spying mission, using the code name "Astrea." She seems to have been recommended by Sir Thomas Killigrew, dramatist, theater manager, and sometime politician, perhaps indicating that she already had some involvement in the literary sphere. Whatever its political effects, the trip was financially disabling for Behn, and in 1668 she was forced to appeal directly to Killigrew and Charles II to preserve her from destitution.

On 20 September 1670 her first play, The Forced Marriage, was performed by the Duke of York's Company at Lincoln's Inn Fields, London. A total of nineteen plays have been attributed to Behn, the most famous of which include The Rover; or, the Banished Cavaliers: Parts I and II (1677, 1680), The Feigned Courtesans; or, A Night's Intrigue (1679), The City Heiress (1682), The Lucky Chance; or, An Alderman's Bargain (1686), and The Emperor of the Moon (1687). Although she experimented with tragicomedy and, in Abdelazer; or the Moor's Revenge (1676), with tragedy, Behn's characteristic mode was comedic. She frequently claimed an equal status as a writer with her male contemporaries. In a statement appended to The Lucky Chance she wrote: "had the Plays I have writ come forth under any Mans Name, and never known to be mine; I appeal to all unbyast Judges of Sense, if they had not said that Person had made as many good Comedies, as any one Man that has writ in our Age; but a Devil on't the Woman damns the Poet." Rather than trying to claim a separate status as a female poet, however, Behn demanded that the "Masculine Part the Poet in me" be taken seriously.

Although she made her living from plays and nondramatic prose, like many writers she seems to have viewed poetry as the more prestigious form. Behn wrote in a variety of genres, many of them generally associated with male poets: erotic poetry, social poetry, and outspoken political verse. She was a staunch royalist, writing in "Pindaric on the Coronation of James II" of the need for her muse to celebrate "the Royal HERO . . . Thy Godlike Patron, and thy Godlike King. " Her poems and plays constantly reworked contemporary political issues and the recent past, notably Sir Patient Fancy (1678) and The Roundheads: or, The Good Old Cause (1681), both staged at times of great political ferment.

Her best-known nondramatic works are Love-Letters Between a Noble-Man and his Sister (1684) and Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave (1688). The former is a risqué and edgy experiment with the epistolary form, probably based on the affair between Lady Henrietta Berkeley and her brother-in-law Forde, Lord Grey of Werke. The latter is an account of the life and death of the noble African prince Oroonoko, taken to work as a slave in Surinam.

Although her literary output remained prodigious, Behn's health failed in the late 1680s; in an elegy to the poet Edmund Waller she presented herself as one "who by Toils of Sickness, am become / Almost as near as thou art to a Tomb." She died on 16 April 1689, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, a tribute that would probably have pleased her. "I am not content to write for a Third day only," she writes in The Lucky Chance, "I value Fame as much as if I had been born a Hero. "

See also Drama: English ; English Literature and Language .