An Introduction To Aphra Behn
A Look at the Biography of this Seventeenth Century Female Writer
Aug 11, 2008
Aphra Behn was a writer who successfully forced the men who dominated the jealous literary world of Restoration England in the seventeenth century,to recognise her as an equal.
She was a feminist who vociferously defended the right of women to an education, and the right to marry who they pleased, or not at all. A sexual pioneer who contended that men and women should love freely and as equals.
She was a political activist who argued the Royalist point of view and became a spy for Charles II against the Dutch. On her return, she was imprisoned, for debt for expenses incurred in the service of the King.
Female Writer
In her twenties she undertook the long voyage to Surinam in the West Indies, where she became involved in a slave rebellion. Her novel Oroonoko contained the first popular portrayal of the horrors of slavery.
In a London that boasted only two theatres, she had seventeen plays produced in seventeen years. She wrote thirteen novels (thirty years before Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe-generally termed the first novel), and published several collections of poems and translations.
Who was Aphra Behn?
For nearly two hundred years after her death, she disappeared almost entirely from the pages of literature and of history itself. The facts of her birth, parentage and ancestry gradually grew into fiction.
Behn spoke of her father, mother, sisters and brother in the autobiographical Oroonoko, but gave little information about them, except to say that her father had been appointed Lieutenant General of Surinam, a British colony on the coast of South America.
Behn's Biography
Her first biography, "History of the Life and Memoirs of Mrs. Behn", published shortly after Behn died in 1689, confirmed her autobiographical statement and added that she was a gentle woman by birth, of a good family in the city of Canterbury in Kent.
The author of Aphra's biography was a contemporary who claimed to have known her intimately but chose to remain anonymous herself, revealing only that she was “one of the fair sex”.
Since one of the fair sex was Behn's first and last biographer for more than two hundred years, there was no one to question its validity, until the end of the nineteenth century, when Sir Edmund Gosse happened on an unexpected reference to Mrs Behn.
Behn's De-biographers
While reading through a recently discovered manuscript of Anne Finch, the Countess of Winchelsea, he discovered a hastily scribbled note: "Mrs Behn was daughter to a barber who lived formally in Wye, a little market town in Kent."
Edmund Gosse sent a letter to the parish priest at Wye asking him to verify the information. The vicar corroborated the story. Gosse published his discovery commenting that Behn was guilty of the vanity of pretending she was born at Canterbury in order to conceal the fact that she was a barber's daughter
The matter was further complicated by the publication in 1913 of an article by Earnest Bernbaum entitled Mrs Behn's Biography: A Fiction, Mr Bernbaum contended that one of the fair sex was not a woman, that Behn never went to Surinam but copied her description of the colony and was never a spy for Charles II. He also contended that "one of the fair sex" was really Charles Gildon.
The evidence he gave for doubting Behn's word was primarily speculative, he had discovered no new facts. Mrs Behn's Biography: A Fiction, it seems, was based more on an unwillingness to believe that a woman could have lived the life she did. Aphra Behn was finally returned to the silence thought proper for a woman of her time.
Sources:
Goreau, Angeline, Reconstructing Aphra A Social Biography of Aphra Behn, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980
