Aphra Behn

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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.
Engraving of Aphra Behn circa 1675, after a portrait by Mary Beale. Seated, she is wearing a pearl necklace and a voluminous gown.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Features Anne Wharton
AW 's To Mrs. A. Behn likens her to Sappho .
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...
Textual Features Germaine Greer
Its nearly fifty poets include Margaret Cavendish , Katherine Philips , and Aphra Behn ; however, the anthology also presents more obscure writers like Diana Primrose , An Collins , Mary Carey , Anna Trapnel
Textual Features Elizabeth Carter
This was a work of science for the use of Ladies,
Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies. Translator Carter, Elizabeth, Cave, 1739, 2 vols.
title-page
on the model of Fontenelle 's Plurality of Worlds (which Aphra Behn had translated into English). Like Fontenelle, Algarotti casts a noble female...
Textual Features Elizabeth Griffith
EG 's collection recovers fiction of an earlier style than her own. It incorporates material from three English texts (besides the Behn , they are Penelope Aubin 's The Noble Slaves, and some of...
Textual Production Catharine Trotter
That is, it was played by a company denuded (by the actors' walkout of autumn 1694) of the talents of Betterton , Bracegirdle , and Barry , but invigorated a month or so earlier by...
Textual Production Susanna Centlivre
Though SC was good at French, this copy of Fontenelle may well have been the translation by Aphra Behn .
Textual Production Elizabeth Gunning
These are: The Wife with Two Husbands (from a tragi-comedy, never acted, by de Pixérécourt), Malvina (a recent novel, by Cottin, in sentimental and exclamatory style), and Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, the...
Textual Production Ephelia
The book was handsomely produced, having a decorated dedication page, and a frontispiece featuring an oval portrait (or fictitious portrait) of Ephelia, with a heraldic badge above the picture and a pedestal bearing her engraved...
Textual Production Catharine Trotter
It was published by 30 January 1696, as written by a Young Lady, with a dedication to Lord Dorset and a commendatory poem by Delarivier Manley which described CT as the heir to both...
Textual Production Delarivier Manley
DM seems the most likely author of an anonymous elegy on Aphra Behn , published six days after her death.
Foxton, Rosemary. “Delariviere Manley and ‘Astrea’s Vacant Throne’”. Notes and Queries, Vol.
231 (new series 33: 1)
, Mar. 1986, pp. 41-2.
41-2
The ascription of this tribute has become more credible with the revelation of DM
Textual Production Sarah Chapone
SC had an important role in George Ballard 's pioneering work of women's history and women's biography. She introduced him to an even more important influence, Elizabeth Elstob ; she helped in his research; and...
Textual Production Eliza Haywood
Later editions increase the number of prefatory tributes. The sixth (a handsome publication with a two-colour title page) places first a poem of compliment by the young James Sterling . Sterling presents EH as a...
Textual Production Mary Pix
The satire is a response to the current flood of attacks on women; it has sometimes been attributed to Aphra Behn .
Textual Production Eliza Haywood
This play (based on Aphra Behn 's The Lucky Chance, 1686) was published soon afterwards.
Monthly Catalogue, 1723-1730. Gregg Press.
6 (1723-30)
It went through three London editions, an edition at Glasgow in 1757, and an adaptation and condensation...

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