The subject of my ninth blog post for History’s Hidden Heroines is playwright, poet, novelist and spy Aphra Behn. I have chosen her because she hales from the city where I live and was the first ever Englishwoman to make her living as a professional writer. I want to raise awareness of Aphra Behn because she has nowhere near as much recognition as Geoffrey Chaucer or Christopher Marlowe, underlined by the fact that she doesn’t yet have a statue in Canterbury but both men do. This probably comes as no surprise given that fewer than 3% of the statues in the UK are of non-royal women. However, it is particularly infuriating given that Aphra was born and raised in Canterbury, unlike Chaucer, who lived in London all his life, and she had many more plays produced on the London stage in her lifetime than fellow Canturburian Marlowe did. Fortunately, ‘A is for Aphra’ and the Canterbury Commemoration Society are currently fundraising for a bronze statue to address this injustice.
Very little is known of Aphra’s early life. The only person who claimed to have known her as a child was the cavalier Colonel Thomas Colepeper who declared in his manuscript 'Adversaria' that she was born 'at Sturry or Canterbury,' that her mother had been his wet-nurse, that her father's name was Johnson and that she had a sister called Frances. Another contemporary source was Anne Finch, countess of Winchilsea, who in marginalia on the poem ‘The Circuit of Apollo’ states that Aphra was reputed to be 'Daughter to a Barber, who liv'd formerly at Wye a little market town (now much decay'd) in Kent'.
According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the two accounts fit an Eaffrey Johnson, whose parents were married at St Paul's, Canterbury, on 25 August 1638. Her father was Bartholomew Johnson from Bishopsbourne, who was a barber in Canterbury, and her mother was Elizabeth Denham from a trading family in Smeeth. Aphra’s older sister Frances was baptized in Smeeth on 6 December 1638 and Aphra was born on 14 December 1640 at Harbledown near Canterbury. At least two other births followed, of George, buried at St Margaret's in 1656, and of an unnamed boy alive in the 1660s. In 1654, Aphra’s father Bartholomew was appointed an overseer of the poor for St Margaret's in central Canterbury.
Following the narrator’s account of her own life in Oroonoko (1688), some biographers think Aphra travelled with her family to the English (later Dutch) colony of Surinam (in the Guianas of South America). They believe she had returned to England by 1664, when she married a Dutch merchant named Johan Behn, though they separated soon after and by 1666 Johan was dead. In any case, from 1664 Aphra went by the name of ‘Mrs Behn’ professionally. After her husband died, Aphra was left without funds. Perhaps because of her association, through him, with the Dutch, she acted as a spy in Antwerp on behalf of the court of Charles II during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Espionage was not a lucrative career, however, and since Charles did not respond to Aphra’s requests for money for her trip home, in December 1666 she was forced to borrow for her passage back to London. Some accounts have her serving time in debtors’ prison, although that (like much else about her life) is not officially documented.
Her dire financial situation, whether or not she was imprisoned for debt, led Aphra to write for an income. She began working as a scribe and then as a playwright for two theatre companies that were authorised by Charles II after the Restoration - the King’s Company and the Duke’s Company. Her first few works in the early 1670s (The Force’d Marriage, The Amorous Prince, The Dutch Lover) were not commercial successes. 1677’s ‘The Rover’, however, was a critical and commercial victory. It was produced in two parts and included in its cast Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II. Aphra’s career in writing for the stage was a remarkable phenomenon. Katherine Philips, Frances Boothby, and possibly Elizabeth Polwhele preceded her as Restoration dramatists, but they each wrote only one or two plays or translations. Aphra, on the other hand, wrote 19 plays in total and probably assisted in the composition of several more).
Much of Aphra’s work was published anonymously during her own lifetime. Now, she is best known for her poetry and her novels ‘The Fair Jilt’ and ‘Oroonoko’. Oroonoko (1688) was the story of an enslaved African prince and is now considered a foundation stone in the development of the English novel. Although not expressly anti-slavery, it was unusual in its time for its sympathetic portrayal of a non-white, non-English protagonist. Her poems were also atypical, being more explicitly sexual than those published by any other woman of her time. Her poetry is frequently frank about female sexual pleasure and humorous about male sexual dysfunction (as in ‘The Disappointment’). As a result, some of it was originally attributed to her friend and male contemporary, the famously bawdy Earl of Rochester.
Homoeroticism is standard in Aphra’s verse, either in descriptions of male-to-male relationships or in depictions of her own attractions to women. Aphra was known to have had male lovers throughout her lifetime, but she also writes explicitly of the love of women for each other. Her poems express unconventional attitudes for the time about other topics as well. She makes a strong antiwar statement in ‘Song: When Jemmy first began to Love,’ concluding with the question of what is to become of the woman left behind. In ‘To Mr. Creech’ she praises the translator of Lucretius for making accessible to unlearned women a work originally in Latin: "Till now, I curst my Birth, my Education, / And more the scanted Customes of the Nation: / Permitting not the Female Sex to tread, / The mighty Paths of Learned Heroes dead."
Aphra was often in poor health and towards the end of 1686 her health worsened. She had trouble walking and writing and may have had a form of arthritis. She died on 16 April 1689 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, demonstrating that in her own time she was a celebrity, famous as a playwright, poet, novelist, and translator. Soon after her death a group of women playwrights, including Delariver Manley and Catherine Trotter, entered the theatre and acknowledged their debt to Aphra. For the first half of the eighteenth century ‘The Rover’ and ‘The Emperor of the Moon’ (a forerunner of the modern-day pantomime) continued to be performed. Yet even before her death, Aphra was labelled as outrageous for the content of her works, which she claimed would not have been criticized for impropriety had a man written them.
As the eighteenth century wore on, authors such as Pope, Johnson, and Richardson castigated Aphra as unfeminine due to her refusal to confine herself to modest subject matter. The Rover had to be modernised for ‘decency’ and her poems decreased in number in the anthologies of women authors until by 1800 she was hardly represented at all. Apart from Oroonoko, sentimentalised into an anti-slavery tale in Britain and France, her novels fell from public view. In the nineteenth century Aphra was either ignored or criticised, both as a representative of the culturally disreputable Restoration and as a vulgar woman whose works should be forgotten. Julia Kavanagh in English Women of Letters (1863) complained that her plays were 'so coarse as to offend even a coarse age'.
Fortunately, over the course of the twentieth century, Aphra’s reputation was gradually rehabilitated. Vita Sackville-West in ‘Aphra Behn: the Incomparable Astrea’ (1927) stressed her importance as the first professional woman writer and Virginia Woolf in ‘A Room of One's Own’ (1929) agreed, declaring that Aphra had earned women ‘'the right to speak their minds'’. Nevertheless, Aphra and her works remained largely unknown to a wider public until the last two decades of the twentieth century, when a new concern for race and gender made Aphra one of the most frequently taught Restoration writers in universities on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time, especially in Britain, there was a new scholarly appreciation of Aphra as a woman of letters, a huge influence on the Restoration theatre and a major force in the development of the early British novel.
Bibliography
A is for Aphra Website Editors. “The Statue.” A is for Aphra. 2021. https://www.aisforaphra.org/the-statue [Accessed 16 August 2021]
BBC History Website Editors. “Aphra Behn (1640 - 1689).” BBC. 2014. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/behn_aphra.shtml [Accessed 16 August 2021]
British Library Website Editors. “Aphra Behn.” British Library. 2021. https://www.bl.uk/people/aphra-behn [Accessed 16 August 2021]
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Website Editors. “Behn, Aphra [Aphara].” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 2004. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-1961 [Accessed 16 August 2021]
Poetry Foundation Website Editors. “Aphra Behn.” Poetry Foundation. 2021. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/aphra-behn [Accessed 16 August 2021]
Topping, Alexandra. “Aphra Behn fans campaign for statue of playwright in Canterbury home.” The Guardian. 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/jun/24/aphra-behn-fans-campaign-statue-canterbury [Accessed 16 August 2021]
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