The Rover | Aphra Behn Biography
Aphra Behn, a favorite of feminist literary critics, is considered to be the first woman to have made a living through her writing. There were other women writers before Behn, but few of them enjoyed financial success. Behn turned to her literary talent after the death of her husband, and she quickly proved her merit as well as her perseverance. Behn suffered from the biases of her time against women writers in general and women dramatists in particular. She was assumed by many of her contemporaries to be a prostitute because of her connection to the theater and because at the time, women who sold their writing were seen as selling themselves. In her prefaces, Behn sometimes commented on her unique status as a woman writer and asked to be taken seriously as a writer, with equal right to freedom in what she wrote. For example, in her preface to The Lucky Chance, or An Alderman's Bargain (1686), she wrote, ‘‘All I ask, is for the privilege for my masculine part, the poet in me...to tread in those successful paths my predecessors have long thrived in...If I must not, because of my sex, have this freedom, but that you will usurp all to yourselves, I [will] lay down my Quill and you shall hear no more of me.’’
Born in 1640 in Kent, England, Behn learned French and Dutch as she grew up. In 1663, she traveled with her family to Surinam, West Indies, where her father was to take an administrative post, but he died on the voyage there, and the family eventually returned. Young Behn kept a journal during her stay in Surinam, which she transformed into the novella Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1688). By the time she was twenty-six, she had lost her husband of three years, a Dutch merchant named Behn about whom little else is known. She briefly held a position as a spy in Antwerp for King Charles II during the war against the Dutch (1665-1667), but was not paid for her work and returned to London a pauper in the year following the Great Fire of 1666. Having unsuccessfully appealed to various friends for financial assistance, Behn served time in debtor's prison and, upon release, began her writing career. Her first play, The Forc'd Marriage, or The Jealous Bridegroom (1670), established her reputation, and she continued to produce enough substantial work each year to make a living. Despite this success, Behn's reputation suffered because of the topics she chose. Many of her eighteen extant plays portray various forms of prostitution, and some of her novels and poems contain frank eroticism that shocked early audiences. Being one of the earliest female playwrights, she was seen as someone who, like an actress, displayed herself to the public. Since actresses were viewed as—and some were—prostitutes, it was assumed by many that Behn was a prostitute, too.
Like her role model, William Shakespeare Behn often mined ideas from existing works and vastly improved upon them. She often complained that her works never attained the fame they deserved because they were ‘‘writ by a woman.’’ However, her achievement survived her, for by the nineteenth century Virginia Woolf would exclaim in A Room of One's Own that a woman could live the writer's life since, ‘‘Aphra Behn had done it!’’
Aphra Behn died in April of 1689. Engraved on her tombstone, perhaps at the request of her lover, John Hoyle, are the words, "Here lies a proof that wit can never be / Defence enough against mortality.’’ She is buried in Westminster Abbey.
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