Oroonoko The Rover Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister
Spouse
Johan Behn
(m. 1664)
Website
aphrabehn.org
Aphra Behn (/ˈæfrəbɛn/;[a] bapt. 14 December 1640[1][2] – 16 April 1689) was an English playwright, poet, prose writer and translator from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors. Rising from obscurity, she came to the notice of Charles II, who employed her as a spy in Antwerp. Upon her return to London and a probable brief stay in debtors' prison, she began writing for the stage. She belonged to a coterie of poets and famous libertines such as John Wilmot, Lord Rochester. Behn wrote under the pastoral pseudonym Astrea. During the turbulent political times of the Exclusion Crisis, she wrote an epilogue and prologue that brought her legal trouble; she thereafter devoted most of her writing to prose genres and translations. A staunch supporter of the Stuart line, Behn declined an invitation from Bishop Burnet to write a welcoming poem to the new king William III. She died shortly after.[3]
She is remembered in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own: "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."[4] Her grave is not included in the Poets' Corner but lies in the East Cloister near the steps to the church.[5]
Her best-known works are Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave, sometimes described as an early novel, and the play The Rover.[6]
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^"Aphra Behn (1640–1689)". BBC. Retrieved 19 April 2017.
^Britland, Karen (2 January 2021). "Aphra Behn's first marriage?". The Seventeenth Century. 36 (1): 33–53. doi:10.1080/0268117X.2019.1693420. ISSN 0268-117X. S2CID 214340536.
^Janet Todd, "Behn, Aphra (1640?–1689)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
^Woolf, Virginia (1929). A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt Brace. p. 69. OCLC 326933.
^"Westminster Abbey". Westminster Abbey. 2015. Retrieved 30 October 2015.
^Behn, Aphra (1998). The Rover: The Feigned Courtesans; The Lucky Chance; The Emperor of the Moon. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-283451-5.
AphraBehn (/ˈæfrə bɛn/; bapt. 14 December 1640 – 16 April 1689) was an English playwright, poet, prose writer and translator from the Restoration era...
Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave is a work of prose fiction by AphraBehn (1640–1689), published in 1688 by William Canning and reissued with two other fictions...
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Dorset dominated verse, and all were attached to the court of Charles. AphraBehn, Matthew Prior, and Robert Gould, by contrast, were outsiders who were...
celebrity actors. The period saw the first professional female playwright, AphraBehn. Charles II was an active and interested patron of drama. Soon after his...
or /æbdəˈlɑːzə/) is a 1676 play by AphraBehn, an adaptation of the c. 1600 tragedy Lust's Dominion. It is Behn's only tragic play. Abdelazer is a captive...
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English Rogue (1665), that feature brothels, while women authors like AphraBehn had offered their heroines alternative careers as precursors of the 19th-century...
short novella by AphraBehn published by Will Canning in 1688, a year before Behn's death. The plot is loosely based around rumors Behn had heard regarding...
the Angel Gabriel, the two are on the verge of war. The British writer AphraBehn used "Astrea" as one of her code-names while working as a spy for King...
anonymously in three volumes (1684, 1685, and 1687), and has been attributed to AphraBehn though its authorship remains disputed in the 21st century. The novel...
Moon is a Restoration farce written by AphraBehn in 1687, based on Italian commedia dell'arte. It was Behn's second most successful play (after The Rover)...
(2004-11-25). "Behn's dramatic response to Restoration politics". In Hughes, Derek; Todd, Janet (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to AphraBehn. Cambridge University...
satires from the time relate a tale of Gwyn, with the help of her friend AphraBehn, slipping a powerful laxative into Davis's tea-time cakes before an evening...
may refer to: The Rover (novel) by Joseph Conrad The Rover (play) by AphraBehn The Rover (1967 film) by Terence Young The Rover (2014 film) by David...
The History of the Nun, or The Fair Vow Breaker, is a novella by AphraBehn published in 1689. It is a piece of amatory fiction. Some of the story's main...
writers by instituting educational institutions for women. Astell and AphraBehn together laid the groundwork for feminist theory in the 17th century....
novel, and helped to popularise the form in Britain with others such as AphraBehn and Samuel Richardson. Defoe wrote many political tracts, was often in...
are the subjects of the novel Oroonoko: Or the Royal Slave (1688), by AphraBehn, which is the tragic love story between Oroonoko and the beautiful Imoinda...
World (1700). This period saw the first professional woman playwright, AphraBehn, author of many comedies including The Rover (1677). Restoration comedy...
1647 to 1660. Thomaso is now best known as the foundation upon which AphraBehn constructed her finest play, The Rover, or the Banished Cavaliers (1677)...
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