Aphra Behn A Restoration Author and Spy
The First Professionally Successful Female Writer in England
Affrey Johnson was born in Wye, Kent, in England in 1640 to a Catholic family. Her father, Bartholomew Johnson, was likely a barber, and her mother, Elizabeth Denham, a wet nurse employed by the Colepeppers, a local noble family. This connection eventually helped Aphra gain entry into that social sphere, particularly as an adult when she was introduced at court.
In 1663, the family moved to Surinam (originally part of Venezuela) and spent a few years there. The reason for this journey is unclear, though it is possible that the Johnson family went to South America as part of a noble family’s retinue. This may never be fully substantiated, since Aphra was famously close-lipped about her early life.
Aphra returned to England in 1664, having possibly married a Dutch merchant named Johan Behn, who may have died of bubonic plague in 1665, known as the Plague Year, which was stopped in its tracks during the Great Fire of London in 1666. Some scholars, however, believe she never married at all, preferring the cloak of respectability that widowhood afforded her, whether real or not.
Aphra Behn‘s wit, charm, literary ability and her bisexual nature (she was reportedly more attracted to women than men) soon enchanted the dissolute court of Charles II, whose return to England and the renewal of monarchy began the age of the Restoration. Following the collapse of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, moral bonds would fall away, and the sexual, material and cultural excesses of the court suited Aphra Behn’s adventurous spirit very nicely.
Aphra Behn Becomes the Spy Astrea for Charles II
Aphra Behn, was retained by the king as a spy and sent to Antwerp in the Netherlands from 1666-67 during the Dutch Wars. Her code name was Astrea, a pen name she was to use throughout her literary life. Her intelligence work was never fully supported however, and there is speculation that the Dutch used her as an unwitting double agent to foil English espionage.
She returned to England in 1668, frustrated and impoverished, having accumulated debts that landed her in debtor's prison for a short time, largely due to King Charles' forfeit in paying her wages. When she re-emerged in society, Aphra reinvented herself, determined to earn her own living by her pen – first as a playwright, then as a poet and novelist.
Aphra Behn the Author Takes on the Restoration
Her first play, the Forced Marriage, was produced in 1670 at Lincoln's Inn Fields, and was a success, marking her debut as a dramatist. Several other plays followed and in 1677, her most famous one, The Rover, with the king’s favored mistress, Nell Gwynn, playing the choice role of the whore Angelica Bianca, cemented her reputation as a playwright even more popular than John Dryden.
Aphra Behn’s works were full of the wit, physical comedy, the double-entendres and comic siatuations prevalent in Restoration plays of her day, but she was also fearless in openly writing on women’s sexuality – this at a time when women in theatre were automatically viewed as courtesans and prostitutes, which of course some were. Behn’s work was often scandalous, but it won her a large following.
A woman writer was at that time called a 'petticoat-author’, a derogatory term coined in literary world dominated by men. Aphra Behn’s few novelistic works belonged to the school of ‘Amatory fiction’, a type of fiction written by women for women that was a precursor to the romantic novels of our day.
Although Aphra Behn wrote several novels, her most famous were Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684), and Oroonoko (1688). Oroonoko, in particular, drew on her experiences living in Surinam and witnessing slavery firsthand. She is among the first to sympathetically portray the plight of slaves in this love story of an enslaved African prince and his beloved.
Aphra Behn published a few books of largely erotic poetry, particularly addressed to women. Her poetry, however, suffered from an ignorance of Latin in a period when classically-inspired poetry was all the rage. Her dearest literary goal was to be recognized as a poet, which she achieved with moderate success, though her body of work is gaining new appreciation today.
Aphra Behn Falls Out of Favour
Charles II died in 1685, and was succeeded by his Catholic brother James II. Although Aphra Behn supported King James, his ideas of absolute monarchy and tolerance towards both Catholics and Protestants resulted in his abdication in 1688. Aphra Behn was by then suffering the painful and limb-twisting effects of rheumatoid arthritis, though she continued to write to the end. She said of her life that she lived “for pleasure and for poetry.”
A Glorious End for Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn died at age 49 in 1689 and was buried in the Cloisters of Westminster Abbey. She believed that there was "no reason why women should not write as well as men." Her successful life as a professional witer prompted Virginia Woolf’s famous lines: “All women together, ought to let flowers fall on the grave of Aphra Behn…for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”
Sources
Fraser, Antonia, The Weaker Vessel, First Vintage Books Edition, October 1985.
Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own, Penguin Modern Classics, 1967.
Aphra Behn by Mary Beale
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