Born: 10 July 1640, United Kingdom
Died: 16 April 1689
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Aphra Johnson
The following is excerpted from the Dictionary of National Biography, originally published between 1885 and 1900, by Smith, Elder & Co. It was written by Edmund Gosse.
BEHN, AFRA, APHRA, APHARA, or AYFARA (1640–1689), dramatist and novelist, was baptised at Wye on 10 July 1640. She was the daughter of John Johnson, a barber, and of Amy, his wife. A relative whom she called her father was nominated by Lord Willoughby to the post of lieutenant-general of Surinam, which was then an English possession. He went out to the West Indies with his whole family when Aphra was still a child. The father died on the outward voyage, but the family settled in the best house in the colony, a charming residence called St. John’s Hill, of which the poetess has given a probably overcharged picture, painted from memory, in her novel of ‘Oroonoko.’ She became acquainted, as she grew up, with the romantic chieftain whose name has just been mentioned, and with Imoinda his wife. A great deal of nonsense was long afterwards talked in London about this friendship, in which the scandal-mongers would fain see a love-affair between Aphra and Oroonoko. The latter, to say the truth, is a slightly fabulous personage, although the poetess says that ‘he was used to call me his “Great Mistress,” and my wishes would go a great way with him.’ England resigned Surinam to the Dutch, and Aphra returned to her native country about 1658. She presently married a city merchant named Behn, a gentleman of Dutch extraction. It appears that through her marriage she gained an entrance to the court, and that she amused Charles II with her sallies and her eloquent descriptions. Her married life, during which she seems to have been wealthy, was brief. Before 1666 she was a widow. When the Dutch war broke out, Charles II thought her a proper person to be entrusted with secret state business, and she was sent over to Antwerp by the government as a spy. During this stay in the Low Countries she was pestered with attentions from suitors, of whom she has left a very lively account. One of those, in a moment of indiscretion, gave her notice of Cornelius de Witt’s intention to send a Dutch fleet up the Thames. Accordingly she communicated the news to london, but her intelligence was ridiculed. She was doomed to adventure in all that she undertook, for having promised to marry a Dutchman named Van der Aalbert, the two lovers separated to meet again in London. But Van der Aalbert was taken with a fever in Amsterdam and died, while Aphra Behn, having set sail from Dunkirk, was wrecked in sight of land, and narrowly escaped drowning. She returned to London, and, as her biographer puts it, she dedicated the remainder of her life to pleasure and poetry.
The fact is that Aphra Behn from this time forth became a professional writer, the first female writer who had lived by her pen in England, and that her assiduity surpassed that of any of the men, her contemporaries, except Dryden. Her works are extremely numerous. The truth seems to be that she had been left unprovided for at the death of her husband, and that the court basely failed to reward her for her services in Holland. She was driven to her pen, and she attempted to write in a style that should be mistaken for that of a man. Her earliest attempt was taken from a novel of La Calprenède, a tragedy of ‘The Young King,’ in verse. She did not find a manager or even a publisher who would take it, and she put it away. She gradually, however, made friends among the playwrights of the day, and particularly with Edward Ravenscroft, with whom there is reason to believe that her relations were very close. He wrote many of her early epilogues for her. In 1671 she produced at the Duke’s Theatre the tragicomedy of the ‘Forc’d Marriage,’ in which Otway, a boy from college, unsuccessfully appeared on the stage for the first and only time in the part of the king. Still in 1671, she brought out and printed a coarse comedy, called ‘The Amourous Prince.’ It would appear that she had been for some time knocking in vain at the doors of the theatres; it does not seem to be known what induced the management of the Duke’s to bring out two plays by a new writer within one year. In 1673 she published the ‘Dutch Lover,’ a comedy. Her tragedy of ‘Abdelazar,’ a rifacimento of Marlowe’s ‘Lust’s Dominion,’ was acted at the Duke’s Theatre late in the year 1676, and published in 1677. This play contains the beautiful song, ‘Love in fantastic triumph sat.’ In 1677 she enjoyed a series of dramatic successes. She brought out the ‘Rover,’ an anonymous comedy. This play took the fancy of the town, was patronised by the Duke of York, and, being supposed to be written by a man, gave rise to great curiosity. She immediately followed it up with the ‘Debauchee,’ 1677, also anonymous, the worst and least original of her plays, and with the ‘Town Fop,’ also 1677, in which she makes extraordinary efforts, first, to write as uncleanly as any of her male rivals, and, secondly, to revive the peculiar manner of Ben Jonson, which had quite gone out of fashion. Mrs. Behn never scrupled to borrow, and she took the plot of her next play, ‘Sir Patient Fancy,’ 1678, from Molière’s ‘Malade Imaginaire.’ She was blamed for this, and for the startling indelicacy of her dialogue, and she tartly responds in an extremely amusing preface to the first edition of this play. Engaged in a great variety of other literary work, she was silent on the stage until 1681, when she brought out a second part of the ‘Rover,’ with her name attached to the title-page. The next one or two years were years of great prosperity to Aphra Behn. Her comedies produced and printed in 1682, the ‘Roundheads’ and the ‘City Heiress,’ were very well received by packed tory audiences; Otway wrote a prologue to the latter; the former was rapturously dedicated to the Duke of Grafton. The ‘False Count,’ 1682, was her next comedy, Aphra Behn was encouraged in 1683 to publish her mild little first poem, the ‘Young King.’ After this she appealed to the stage but once more during her life with the ‘Lucky Chance,’ a comedy, and the ‘Emperor of the Moon,’ a farce, in 1687; both of these pieces were failures. In 1684 she had collected her ‘Poems,’ the longest of which is a laborious amorous allegory entitled ‘A Voyage to the Isle of Love.’ In 1688 she published ‘A Discovery of New Worlds,’ from the French of Fontenelle, with a curious ‘Essay on Translation,’ by herself, prefixed to the version. Her laborious life, however, was now approaching its close. In a beautiful copy of elegiac verses which she contributed to a volume of poems in memory of Waller in 1688, she speaks of long indisposition and ‘toils of sickness’ which have brought her almost as near to the tomb as Waller is. She died, in fact, in consequence of want of skill in her physician, on 16 April 1689, and was buried in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, where her name may still be seen inscribed on a slab of black marble. Her tragi-comedy of the ‘Widow Ranter’ was brought out in 1690 by ‘one G. J., her friend,’ and finally in 1696 another of her posthumous plays, the ‘Younger Brother,’ was published by Gildon, with a short memoir prefixed.
Aphra Behn was a graceful, comely woman, with brown hair and bright eyes, and was painted so in an existing portrait of her by John Ripley. She is said to have introduced milk punch into England. She deserves our sympathy as a warm-hearted, gifted, and industrious woman, who was forced by circumstance and temperament to win her livelihood in a profession where scandalous writing was at that time obligatory. It is impossible, with what we know regarding her life, to defend her manners as correct or her attitude to the world as delicate. But we may be sure that a woman so witty, so active, and so versatile, was not degraded, though she might be lamentably unconventional. She was the George Sand of the Restoration, the ‘chère maítre’ to such men as Dryden, Otway, and Southerne, who all honoured her with their friendship. Her genius and vivacity were undoubted; her plays are very coarse, but very lively and humorous, while she possessed an indisputable touch of lyric genius. Her prose works are decidedly less meritorious than her dramas and the best of her poems.
Mrs. Behn published a great number of ephemeral pamphlets, besides her once famous novels. Works of hers which have not been hitherto named are: 1. ‘The Adventures of the Black Lady,’ a novel, 1684. 2. ‘La Montre, or the Lover’s Watch,’ a sketch of a lover’s customary way of spending the twenty-four hours, in prose, 1686. 3. ‘Lycidus,’ a novel, 1688. 4. * The Lucky Mistake,’ a novel, 1689. 5. * Poetical Remains,’ edited by Charles Gildon, 1698. Aphra Behn published a great number of occasional odes in separate pamphlet form, among which may be mentioned ‘A Pindarick on the Death of Charles II,’ 1686, and ‘A Congratulatory Poem to her most Sacred Majesty [Mary of Modena],’ 1688. She joined other eminent hands in publishing a version of ‘Ovid’s Heroical Epistles’ in 1683. Her plays were collected in 1702, her ‘Histories and Novels’ in 1698, the latter including, besides what have been mentioned above, ‘Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave,’ which inspired Southerne’s well-known tragedy; ‘The Fair Jilt,’ a story, the scene of which is laid in Antwerp, and recounts experiences in the life of the writer; ‘The Nun; ‘Agnes de Castro;’ and ‘The Court of the King of Bantam.’ The works of Aphra Behn passed through many editions in the eighteenth century, the eighth appearing in 1735, and one of her plays, ‘The Rover,’ long continued to hold the stage in a modified form.
The following is excerpted from A Cyclopædia of Female Biography, published 1857 by Groomsbridge and Sons and edited by Henry Gardiner Adams.
BEHN, APHRA, A celebrated English poetess, was descended from a good family In the city of Canterbury. She was born In the reign of Charles the First, but in what year is uncertain. Her father’s name was Johnson. He was related to Lord Willoughby, and by his interest was appointed lieutenant-general of Surinam and thirty-six islands, and embarked for the West Indies when Aphra was very young Mr. Johnson died on the passage, but his family arrived at Surinam, where Aphra became acquainted with the American prince Oroonoko, whose story she has given In her celebrated novel of that name. She relates that “she had often seen and conversed with that great man, and been a witness to many of his mighty actions; and that at one time, he and Imoinda his wife. Were scarce an hour in a day from her lodgings.” The intimacy between Oroonoko and the poetess occasioned some reflections on her conduct, from which she was subsequently cleared.
The afflictions she met with at Surinam, in the death of her parents and relations, obliged her to return to England, where, soon after her arrival, she married Mr. Behn, an eminent merchant in London, of Dutch extraction. King Charles the Second, whom she highly pleased by the entertaining and accurate account she gave him of the colony of Surinam, thought her a proper person to be entrusted with the management of some affairs during the Dutch. war, which was the cause of her going to Antwerp. Hore she discovered the design formed by the Dutch, of sailing up the Thames, in order to bum the English ships; she made this discovery through her lover, Vander Albert, a Dutchman.
Mrs. Behn could not doubt the truth of this communication, and sent information of it immediately by express to England. But her Intelligence (though well grounded, as the event showed) being disregarded and ridiculed, she renounced all state affairs, and amused herself during her stay at Antwerp, with the pleasures of the city.
After some time she embarked at Dunkirk, for England, and in the passage was near being lost; the ship was driven on the coast for four days, but by the assistance of boats the crew were all saved.
Mrs. Behn published three volumes of poems; the first in 1684, the second in 1685, the third In 1688. They consist of songs and other little pieces, by the Earl of Rochester, Sir George Etherage, Mr. Henry Crisp, and others, with some pieces of her own. To the second volume is annexed a translation of the Duke de Rochefoucault’s moral reflections, under the title of “Seneca Unmasked.” She wrote also seventeen plays, some histories and novels. She translated Fontenelle’s History of Oracles, and Plurality of Worlds, to which last she annexed an essay on translation and translated prose. The Paraphrase of Ænone’s Epistle to Paris, in the English translation of Ovid’s Epistles, is Mrs. Behn’s; and Mr. Dryden, in the preface to that work, pays her the following compliment:—”I was desired to say, that the author, who is of the fair sex, understood not Latin; but if she do not, I am afraid she has given us who do, occasion to be ashamed.” She was also the authoress of the celebrated Letters between “A Nobleman and his Sister,” printed in 1684; and of eight love-letters to a gentleman whom she passionately loved, and with whom she corresponded under the name of Lycidas. She died, after a long indisposition, April 16th, 1689, and was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey.
The following is excerpted from The Learned Lady in England 1650-1760 by Myra Reynolds, published in 1920.
Aphra Amis, Mrs. Behn (1640-1689)
The only important dramatic work by a woman during the second half of the seventeenth century was by Mrs. Behn. She was born at Wye, in Kent. While she was still very young the Amis family went to Surinam, West Indies, where Aphra’s girlhood was spent. At about twenty-three she returned to England and soon thereafter married Mr. Behn, a London merchant of Dutch parentage. At his death, before 1666, she was left nearly penniless. For a short time she was in Holland as a secret political agent for the English court. But her services received scant official recognition and the pay was so meager and uncertain that she returned to England and began to look about for other means of support. The new passion for the theater was not yet exhausted and she turned instinctively to play-writing as her most hopeful resource. During the years 1670-1689 her literary output extended into many other fields and shows continuous work at high pressure. Not only was she one of the chief assets of the Duke’s Theater as a playwright, but she also translated French verse and prose; she wrote numerous occasional poems; she edited miscellanies; and she wrote novels. Her comedies had a most flattering contemporary vogue and some of them maintained their popularity well into the next century. She satisfied the taste of the day for rapid, bustling plots, with many and varied characters, and her intrigues were cleverly manipulated, while she surpassed most of her contemporaries in vivacious, easy, rapid dialogue. She is never dull or insipid. Her plays show that she had a vigorous mind, an overflow of spirits, a reckless mental energy. There is apparent a sense of power conscious of itself and careless of precedents or restrictions. In defiance of Ben Jonson, Dryden, and Shadwell she spoke contemptuously of “the musty unities.” The material for her plays she took wherever she found it, from preceding plays, from romances, from real life, used it, made it over, and often so improved it that she could justifiably laugh at charges of plagiarism. One charge she could not evade and that had to do with the immorality of her writings. Dryden, Shadwell, Wycherley, and Etherege, and the audiences who applauded their plays, seemed to find the vis comica in an open indecency of character, situation, and conversation that is to-day almost unbelievable. And of Mrs. Behn it must be admitted that she vied with the most corrupt, She said, in extenuation, as Dryden also said in answer to Jeremy Collier’s strictures, that she wrote to please. She did not consider comedy “a reforming or converting agent,” it was meant to be “an entertainment.” Her emphasis on the vicious elements of the life about her was a clear case of supply and demand, but it had an unhappy personal result. There early gathered about her name a hostile tradition based on the fact that she was not only a woman writer, but an eminently successful woman writer, and on the further fact that, being a woman, she had not the modest reserve for which the chaste Orinda was idolized, but presented debaucheries in the bold and open manner characteristic of contemporary male playwrights. This hostile tradition, crystallized by Pope in a witty couplet, became a commonplace of adverse criticism, and Astræa’s undeniable talents have sunk into oblivion. A general revival of Mrs. Behn’s comedies would be impossible, undesirable, but by the student of social and political history in the Restoration period they cannot be ignored.
Mrs. Behn’s novels are now as little known as her plays, but in her own day were very popular. Oroonoko, the first and by far the best, was based on her life in Surinam. At a time when French heroic romances, with their high-flown adventures, unreal characters, and stilted dialogue, were the only works of fiction, Mrs. Behn’s short, simple, vigorous, and affecting story of real life comes with a startling sense of novelty. The vivid portrayal of the cruelties incident to the slave trade, though probably written without didactic intent, gives the story a modern humanitarian note not unprophetic of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And the description of the Indian Prince as the ideal natural man, his innate virtues in their pristine purity unvitiated by civilization, foreshadows the theories of Rousseau. The descriptions of nature, however exaggerated, are vivid and attractive, and show a delight in scenic detail not found again in fiction before Mrs. Collyer in 1730. Thus in four ways, choice of real life as a theme, interest in scenery, emphasis on the natural man, and on humanitarianism, Mrs. Behn’s little story links itself with the novel of the future rather than with the romances of the past. In the plays Mrs. Behn showed exceptional ability in a realm in which women have seldom excelled. In her novels she marked out a path where women have gained marked literary success.
In one other way she is an important, outstanding figure. She was the first woman in England who made authorship a profession, the first one who definitely set out to earn her living by her pen. It is unfortunate that the first literary lady to achieve “economic independence” should likewise be the first whose writings were notably unmoral. But it is a law of human nature that an unaccustomed freedom seldom contents itself in its early exercise of power with destroying merely the unjust bonds by which it has been confined. Freedom is likely to begin by being license. And when Aphra Behn so defied convention as to compete with men as a playwright on the public stage, when she openly criticized her contemporaries and boasted that her comedies did not fall below most that she read, she had so set herself apart in an unfeminine realm that prudishness and decency fell together. Psychologically the actress and the writer of comedies seem to have gone through similar experiences.
Plays between 1696 and 1706
Mrs. Behn had no feminine contemporary rivals, but later in the century a number of women attempted to write for the stage. In Genest’s record for Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields seven plays by six women are listed in 1696. In the ensuing ten years at least eighteen more plays by women appeared. This exceptional activity did not pass without satiric comment. In 1697 “W. M.’s” Female Wits, with its attack on Miss Trotter, Mrs. Manley, and Mrs. Pix, was acted six times without intermission, a run showing exceptional popularity. In 1702 the hostility of the wits towards women playwrights was again voiced in Gildon’s The Two Stages. Genest says that about this time “prejudice against females rose so high that Mrs. Centlivre in Stolen Heiress and Mrs. Pix in Conquest of Spain spoke of their plays as if by men.” The authors of these twenty-five plays were Miss Trotter, Mrs. Pix, Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Centlivre, Mrs. Wiseman, “A Lady,” “A Young Lady,” “A Lady of Quality,” and “A Club of Ladies.” Fourteen of the plays were tragedies, the best one being, probably, Miss Trotter’s Fatal Friendship, almost the only one of the fourteen that survived on the stage after its initial season. The writers of comedy were more successful.
The following is excerpted from A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, written by John W. Cousins and published in 1929 by J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.
BEHN, APHRA (JOHNSTON) (1640-1689). —Novelist and dramatist, dau. of a barber named Johnston, but went with a relative whom she called father to Surinam, of which he had been appointed Governor. He, however, d. on the passage thither, and her childhood and youth were passed there. She became acquainted with the celebrated slave Oronoko, afterwards the hero of one of her novels. Returning to England in 1658 she m. Behn, a Dutch merchant, but was a widow at the age of 26. She then became attached to the Court, and was employed as a political spy at Antwerp. Leaving that city she cultivated the friendship of various playwrights, and produced many plays and novels, also poems and pamphlets. The former are extremely gross, and are now happily little known. She was the first English professional authoress. Among her plays are The Forced Marriage, Abdelazer, The Rover, The Debauchee, etc., and her novels include Oronoko and The Nun. The former of these was the first book to bring home to the country a sense of the horrors of slavery, for which let her have credit.