Everything we don’t know about Aphra Behn

Posted on by

The first English woman to make her living entirely as a writer was Aphra Behn. She’s known to have been born, to have been a spy, to have been a writer, and to have died. After that, information about her ranges from the sketchy to the questionable. 

What could be more fun than writing about someone nobody knows much about?

She was born in 1640. Her father might have been a barber and her mother might have been a wet nurse. They might also not have been. 

Her last name might have been Johnson. She might have been adopted. 

Since we can’t sketch in her family, let’s sketch in the times she lived in: The English Civil Wars ran from 1642 to 1651. In 1660, the Stuart kings settled their hind ends back on the throne they’d been lusting after. So she grew up in turbulent times and was twenty at the start of the Restoration, which is a fancy name for the aforesaid Stuart hind end settling back on that throne.

Irrelevant photo: This is one of about a dozen big, flat wildflowers that don’t look alike but are similar enough that I doubt I’ll ever learn their names.

She may or may not have spent some time in Surinam.

Suri-what? A small country in South America. It was an English colony until 1667, when it became Dutch. Under the English, it evolved into a place of sugar plantations and slave labor, which gets an early mention because it feeds into one of Behn’s books. 

(It’s irrelevant but interesting to note that the Parliamentarians–the folks who threw out the Stuart kings–were no more opposed to slavery than the Royalists were. That won’t be on the test. In fact, there won’t be a test. This is a blog. You can stop reading right here if the mood takes you.) 

If Behn had been a man, an aristocrat, or a religious nonconformist, she’d have left more information behind, or so say Abigail Williams and Kate O’Connor in an essay. The surprise in that, for me, is the nonconformists. They were prone, both the men and the women, to keeping spiritual journals. 

In 1664, Behn married a merchant named Johan Behn, although the marriage might not have lasted long. He might have died the next year. He might not have. Either way, that’s the last we’ll hear of him. 

She was a royalist spy in Antwerp during the Anglo-Dutch War. If she was in Surinam, she might have been there as a spy. 

Of course, she also might not have been in Surinam as a spy. 

She might not have been in Surinam at all. 

Don’t you love history?

Spying wasn’t a good way to get rich. According to one source, she wasn’t paid at all and had to borrow money to get home from Antwerp.

That leads to our next questionable statement: She ended up in debtors prison, according to one source (a different one this time) for “debts she incurred in service to the crown.” None of the other sources I’ve found mention the reason for her debts. In fact, the British Library entry on her says there’s no documentation that she was ever in debtors prison.

If she was, though, either somebody ponied up the money needed to break her loose or she started writing as a way to get herself out. Either way, write she did, and back then it was a better way to make money than it is today. Writing was still the hot new medium. You know how parents yell at their kids to get off their phones and turn off their computers? “Go read a book and learn something,” they say. Well, back then parents yelled at their kids to put down their books, get out in the fresh air, and be ignorant.

Yes, every last parent. Every last kid. That’s how you can tell what the hot new medium is: Parents are appalled by it.

Now we’ll take a quick step back. Bear with me. Before the Restoration, the theaters were closed. They were frivolous and led to perdition and fun. Then the king sashayed back to London, the party began, and theater companies were licensed. It wasn’t exactly a new medium, but it was hot all the same.

Behn started working for two of the theater companies that had started up, first as a scribe, then as a playwright. Fittingly, the timelines I’ve seen are contradictory, but her first plays either were or weren’t commercial successes, but either a later or the first one was. But forget which play it was, one of them ran for six nights, and that counted as a smash hit. The income from the third day (and the sixth if there was one, and the ninth if miracles should occur) of a run went to the author, so she got the income from two nights. 

She went on to write and publish an assortment of other plays, some successful, some not, and one–now lost–a complete disaster, involving an arrest for an abusive prologue (or epilogue–take your pick) attacking the Duke of Monmouth. She was (probably) let off with a warning. 

Nope, I have no idea what it said. It’s lost. Sorry. 

Some of her plays were definitely her plays. Others might have been her plays but might have been someone else’s. During her lifetime, a lot of her work was published anonymously, which helps explain the murkiness over what was her work and what wasn’t.

She also published novels and poetry. 

She had a couple of lovers. One of them, John Hoyle, is believed to have written the epitaph (not to be confused with that troublesome epilogue) that’s on her tombstone: “Here lies a proof that wit can never be Defence enough against mortality.”

She died in 1689, at forty-nine. 

So what did she have to say? Well, in her novel Oroonoko, the narrator swears the story’s true, that she either saw everything in it  or was told it by its hero, thus muddying the autobiographical waters by pouring fiction into alleged fact. The book’s unusual in English literature in its choice of hero, an African prince sold into slavery in Surinam. Behn wasn’t not free from the prejudices of her time and place–who is?–but she allowed him his humanity, something it took European writers and their descendants centuries to find their way back to.

She also wrote about sex–about women enjoying sex and about men sometimes failing to enjoy it, much as they would have liked to. “The Disappointment” is full of seventeenth century roundaboutness, but it’s also frank: The man couldn’t get it up. 

 

      . . . In vain th’ enraged Youth assaid

      To call his fleeting Vigour back. . . .

      In vain he Toils, in vain Commands,

      Th’ Insensible fell weeping in his Hands.

 

After Behn died, Memoirs on the Life of Mrs Behn. By a Gentlewoman of her Acquaintance was published, further blurring the line between fact and fiction. The gentlewoman was probably a man named Charles Gildon, who drew heavily on her fiction, along with her letters, to piece together a life, leaning heavily on sex to sell the story.

Behn went out of fashion in more prudish centuries and–well, Restoration literature doesn’t draw a mass audience anymore, but feminists since Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf have been rediscovering her, reinterpreting her, re-appreciating her, and in Sackville-West’s case reimagining her from the ground up. 

Which given the gaps in her story is easy to do. You have no facts to lean on but you also have none to contradict you. 

43 thoughts on “Everything we don’t know about Aphra Behn”

  2. I’d heard of her, but never read anything by her. You’d think that there’d be loads of information about her, given that she was rather unusual. It’s interesting that the one thing people know is that she was a spy. That’s the kind of thing that people generally don’t tend to find out about someone.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • I had the same thought about the spying. As for the rest, women tended not to leave much in the way of a paper trail through life. Men were much better recorded. It’s one reason we don’t know how many women worked in various trades: Their husbands were on record. They were–from this vantage point–invisible.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply ↓

      • It was the same, very frustrating, thing when I read a biography of Joan of Kent. Anything that’s known of her rather extraordinary life is known because there are records of her father, her three husbands and her sons. Just about the only thing that’s known about her as her is that she was countess of Kent in her own right.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply ↓

        • Ditto Whatername–Elfrida, the first Anglo-Saxon queen who was crowned, rather than just married to the king. I picked up a book about her, and the best the author could do was write all the way around the blank spot that was Elfrida. A bit more was known that what you say about Joan of Kent, but not much.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply ↓

  3. The first time I came across her was as a character in Pamela Belle’s historical novels – she features in one of them as a friend of the protagonist. I think the Restoration era was a really interesting time for women – England did so well to boot the Cromwells out and not go down the same route as parts of New England did!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • I have deeply mixed feelings about the Protectorate. On the one hand, they were joyless etc. etc. On the other hand, the period contained a lot of contradictory drives, including some toward equality and toward religious freedom (with exceptions, I admit). There was a lot of intellectual ferment and they were looking for a way to run a country without a monarchy–something they notably failed to accomplish for long.

      On the other hand, they were joyless etc. etc.

      I need to learn more about the Restoration to balance that out.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply ↓

  5. A fascinating piece. Despite having done a BA in English Lit I’d never heard of her – I guess that’s what you get for focusing on the 19th century! You’ve piqued my interest to find out more about this interesting woman.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

  7. There’s room there for someone to write a historical novel or TV costume drama about her.

    Not so long ago I read a book about women “intelligencers” (i.e., spies), mostly in the (English) Civil Wars, but up to and including Aphra Behn. As it pointed out, women were well-placed for this precisely because men (apart from those who employed them to report) took it for granted that women couldn’t possibly be interested in or capable of involving themselves independently in anything political or military. But the author suggests that much or all of what she wrote home from Antwerp might have been fictional (which might explain why payment was less than lavish).

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • Ah, yes, the gift that comes with being underestimated. And so little being known about her would be another gift–this one to the scriptwriter. You could make up just about anything and nothing on the record contradicts it.

      The possibility that she made up her reports reminds me of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana.

      Like

      Reply ↓

  10. This lack of fact reeks of current times. Or maybe it doesn’t. The news is so blurry it is really hard to say. And I really need to get back to the garden and visit something irrelevant and plants. And irrelevant on phonetically resembles ear elephant unless one is trampled by irrelevant facts. And then they are more similar than we could possibly hope to avoid.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply ↓

  11. Wonderful ! I had never heard of her and I double-majored in obscure English/American literature. (Including “The Damnation of Theron Ware” by Harold Frederic) However, given the relative dates for her, hasn’t anyone suggested she wrote Shakespeare’s plays – or vice versa ?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • Isn’t that typical? Just because she was a woman, no one thinks of claiming she wrote Shakespeare’s plays. I tell you–.

      “The Damnation of Theron Ware”? Harold Frederic? I’m deeply impressed by their obscurity.

      Like

      Reply ↓

  13. It sounds like an interesting life. If I were to do the modern summary of this post, you know, the one where things are removed from context to form a different argument, I would go with,

    “The first English woman to make her living entirely as a writer…She ended up in debtors prison.”

    So much for my retirement plan ;-)

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply ↓

  15. Your post just sum up the world so well..

    I particularly loved this …”The £350 million national tutoring program depends on schools being able to cough up 25% of the cost of an academic mentor, who may be a newly qualified teacher or a graduate who’s not a teacher at all and never planned to be but who got two weeks of training to be a mentor. Because jobs are hard to come by right now and you can’t blame a person for grabbing what’s available and become and mentor…” Perfect and true

    Oh the mess of the UK in every possible way we are messed up.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

Talk to me

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.