The
Incomparable Astrea: An Introducton to Aphra Behn
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"All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn[...], for it is she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she -- shady and amorous as she was -- who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits." - Virginia Woolf
Unfortunately for Mrs. Behn, the tendency both during her life and after it was to equate an author's subject matter with the author's actual life; what in male writers became worldly experience in her was named unsalvageable baseness. While she lived, men and women alike vilified her as a whore, and she was seen as a sort of prostitute even by those who were her friends. After her death, she was all but forgotten except as a bad example; even those who did present her works (often expurgated) usually did so with apologies. It was unseemly, monstrous, and undoubtedly unfeminine for a woman to write for money and repute, and Behn suffered for it for three centuries. Her work was reviled, belittled and ignored.
(A memorable opinion from an anonymous writer in the Saturday Review at the end of the 19th century: "Mrs. Behn is still to be found here and there in the dusty, worm-eaten libraries of old country houses, but, as a rule, we imagine, she has been ejected from all decent society for more than a generation or two. If Mrs. Behn is to be read at all, it can only be from a love of impurity for its own sake[...]. It is true that [her scandalous reputation] did not prohibit her from attaining honorable burial in Westminster Abbey, but it is a pity her books did not rot with her bones.")
Within the last century, however, people are starting to take a new look at Aphra Behn. Although some biographers and critics have fallen prey to the (admittedly strong) temptation of merely portraying Mrs. Behn as a feminist icon, by virtue of her "shady and amorous" lifestyle, while ignoring or slighting her vast catalogue of written work -- a practice which serves her no better than the former centuries' censure -- we are now beginning to see serious, critical and biographical studies of not only Mrs. Behn's important place in the history of women's writing but of her work itself. Her writings (many of which have been long out of print until the 20th century) are being recognized as the groundbreaking pieces that they are, and explored for all their wit, humor, longing, sadness and anger, and how those play their roles in the conquest of satisfying one's appetites -- whether emotional, political, carnal or merely literary.
In an age where women were expected to use themselves as their only commodity, Aphra Behn chose to control her body and sell her thoughts instead. Because of her, writing for women became not only an expression of fancies, but, as Virginia Woolf described it, a matter of "practical importance." The seed was planted: women could earn their keep by their pens, could contribute to their own support, could manage and even thrive on their own. By peddling her literary wares and making a living at her craft, Aphra Behn made it possible for other women to do so as well.
All I ask, is for the privilege for my masculine part, the poet in me (if any such you will allow 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 lay down my quill, and you shall hear no more of me [...]; for I am not content to write for a third day only. I value fame as much as if I had been born a hero; and if you rob me of that, I can retire from the ungrateful world, and scorn its fickle favors. - Aphra Behn, The Lucky Chance
Last updated July 2003
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