Aphra Behn

14 December 1640 - 16 April 1689

Standard Name: Behn, Aphra

Birth Name: Aphra Johnson

Married Name: Aphra Behn

Pseudonym: Astrea

Used Form: A. B.

Used Form: Mrs A. Behn

Used Form: Mrs Behn

Used Form: Mrs A. Behn, the author of the Rover

Used Form: author of the Voyage to the Isle of Love

Used Form: by the Same Hand

It is difficult to summarise AB 's immense and complex importance for the history of women's writing. Virginia Woolf said she deserved from all women a tribute of flowers because she was the first to bring together writing and earning. In fact only two professional (as opposed to amateur) dramatists of either sex (Dryden and Shadwell ) emerged before her on the Restoration stage. Theatrical writing (mostly comedy) supported her for the major part of her career as one of the period's most prolific and popular dramatists. Her poems and translations are also significant in the story of those genres. Later she pioneered the important new forms of novella and full-length epistolary novel. She exploited to the full a raunchy period during which social criticism clothed itself naturally in sex comedy; her gender made her a belated partaker in the academic rediscovery and rehabilitation of the Restoration age.

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Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
politics	Hannah More	Her participation in a form of direct action (in a cause she had already supported in print) was a prelude to her more vigorous action, in a leadership role, in the cause of the English...
Author summary	Ephelia	The Restoration user of the name Ephelia was a remarkably assured, forceful, and accomplished poet (as well as a playwright), although she left, outside her single printed collection (1679), only four poems extant: politicalbroadsheets and...
Author summary	Eliza Haywood	EH was the most prolific novelist by number of titles (even ignoring those doubtfully ascribed) between Aphra Behn and Charlotte Smith . She also wrote poems, plays, periodicals, conduct books, translation, and theatre history. Her...
Author summary	Mary Pix	MP , writing and publishing at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, was the most prolific female playwright since Behn . Her comedies, full of fun and acute observation...
Author summary	Frances Boothby	FB has the distinction of being the sole woman to have a play produced before Aphra Behn , during the first decade of the restored London theatres. Her single extant poem concerns her play. She...
Author summary	Hannah Wolley	HW predates Aphra Behn in making a living by her pen, only in her case her seventeenth-century writings (on cooking, medicine, household skills, and general conduct) aimed to attract students to her other career, which...
Author summary	Mary Davys	MD was one of the first wave of novelists to follow Aphra Behn during the early eighteenth century. She also wrote plays and poetry, and is known as an Irish writer.
Publishing	Elizabeth Griffith	EG 's version of Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette 's The Princess of Cleves. An Historical Novel is available in the Chawton House Library Novels On-line series at http://www.chawtonhouse.org/?page_id=55488. Her version of Aphra Behn 's Oroonoko,...
Reception	Julia Kavanagh	Jewsbury , again reviewing in the Athenæum, called this work a pleasant contribution to the literature of the times. Athenæum. J. Lection. 1826 (1862): 528 She continued (folding together the woman writer with her work in a...
Reception	Delarivier Manley	DM 's fears were realised when The Lost Lover was damn'd. Manley, Delarivier. The Lost Lover. R. Bentley, F. Saunders, J. Knapton, and R. Wellington, 1696. preface She believed this to be due not to any lack of merit but to its being a Woman's Play. Manley, Delarivier. The Lost Lover. R. Bentley, F. Saunders, J. Knapton, and R. Wellington, 1696. preface The text...
Reception	Mary Pix	Richard Steele in The Spectator lumped MP with Behn and other writing women as unlearned, skilled only in the luscious Way. Greer, Germaine et al., editors. Kissing the Rod. Virago, 1988. 414
Reception	Sarah Gardner	George Colman pursued his enmity against SG for almost twenty years, twice staging at the Haymarket Theatre farces in mockery of women dramatists which aim at her, and for each of which he was able...
Reception	Mary Oxlie	This work listed MO as one of its Women among the moderns eminent for poetry. Phillips, nephew and pupil of John Milton , seems quite interested in the existence of women poets. Others in his...
Reception	Margaret Holford	The writer of the note which follows this play in The New British Theatre was not sure if it had ever been staged. The note maintained that the play's quality contradicted the common belief that...
Textual Features	Mary Carleton	The Case presents itself as a rendering of the truth for God to read, if nobody else. It depicts MC according to several different fictional conventions. In youth she resembles the heroines of the Restoration...

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