Aphra Behn Biography Quotes 10 Report mistakes

Early Life and Origins

Aphra Behn (likely born Aphra Johnson) entered the historical record in fragments, a circumstance that mirrors the obstacles faced by many seventeenth-century women. She was probably born in England around 1640, and later took the surname Behn through marriage. Much about her parentage and childhood remains debated; accounts differ over her family's social position and even over basic facts such as whether a father died at sea en route to the Americas. What can be said with confidence is that she received enough education to become fluent, witty, and at ease in the literary and theatrical circles of Restoration London, and that she cultivated a voice bold enough to make a living by the pen at a time when few women could do so.

Suriname and the Seed of Oroonoko

In the 1660s she spent time in the English colony of Suriname in northern South America. The stay was formative. There she observed plantation society, the brutalities of enslavement, and the complex hierarchies of a contested colonial outpost. Decades later these experiences furnished the vivid setting and moral urgency of her most influential prose work, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688). The novella's compressed portrait of an African prince's enslavement and resistance, along with its attention to colonial power and betrayal, reflects encounters that left a lasting imaginative imprint.

Marriage and Name

Behn's marriage is as lightly documented as her birth. She appears to have married a merchant named Behn, often described in later accounts as of Dutch or German background. The union was short-lived, whether by death or separation, yet she kept the name that would become synonymous with a new, professional female authorship in England.

Intelligence Work and the Restoration Court

During the reign of Charles II, Behn undertook intelligence work on behalf of the crown during the Anglo-Dutch conflicts. She was dispatched to the Low Countries and moved among English exiles and foreign officials, attempting to gather information and to influence loyalties. The mission's expenses were not fully reimbursed, and upon her return she struggled with debt, an experience that likely included time in a debtor's prison. The episode sharpened her political loyalties and practical resolve. It also pushed her decisively toward the theatre and the press, arenas where she could turn wit and observation into income.

Making a Living by the Pen

Behn emerged in the 1670s as a dramatist of the Restoration stage, writing comedies and tragedies for the companies that dominated London performance culture. Her early successes included The Forc'd Marriage and The Amorous Prince, and she soon became known for fast-paced intrigue, sharp dialogue, and an unblushing candor about desire. The Duke's Company and, later, the United Company staged her plays, bringing her into the orbit of actor-manager Thomas Betterton and leading performers such as Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle. She wrote Abdelazer; or, The Moor's Revenge, the perennially popular farce The Emperor of the Moon, and the celebrated two-part comedy The Rover, whose rakish hero has often been read alongside the libertine spirit associated with John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Behn worked in the same bustling theatrical world as John Dryden, Nell Gwyn, and other court-connected figures who helped define Restoration taste, even as she carved out a distinctive, combative authorial presence of her own.

Voice, Themes, and Controversies

Behn's stage writing balanced erotic frankness with political bite. She wrote during the Exclusion Crisis, often siding with royalist interests and satirizing Whig hypocrisy in plays such as The City Heiress. Her prologues and epilogues argued, sometimes playfully, sometimes with steel, for women's intellectual authority, refusing to concede that wit was a male prerogative. The Lucky Chance, among her later comedies, reflects her ongoing interest in the economics of marriage and the theater of consent. Accusations of indecency trailed her, a charge also leveled at many of her male contemporaries; she accepted the controversy as the cost of telling truths about gender, money, and power on a public stage.

Fiction, Poetry, and Translation

Behn did far more than write plays. She experimented across genres as a poet, novelist, and translator. Oroonoko became a touchstone for later debates about colonialism, race, and authorship; The Fair Jilt and Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister advanced early prose fiction with their exploration of interiority, desire, and scandal. She translated works from French and Latin, including Bernard de Fontenelle's A Discovery of New Worlds and the sentimental novella Agnes de Castro, helping to bring continental ideas into English conversation. These labors were practical, translation paid, but they also reveal a writer intent on widening the range of subjects and styles available to English readers.

Networks, Stages, and Readers

Behn's career depended on the entangled networks of Restoration performance and print. Managers, players, and booksellers mediated her access to audiences, and she learned to negotiate their interests while asserting her own. Thomas Betterton's companies offered skilled ensembles; actresses like Elizabeth Barry gave her complex heroines presence and pathos; and a growing class of playgoers and readers sustained her commercial viability. Her worlds of intrigue and masquerade echoed courtly fashions, yet her insistence that women speak for themselves pushed against prevailing hierarchies. Even musical afterlives touched her work: Henry Purcell's later incidental music for a revival of Abdelazer kept her plots resonant on the stage beyond her lifetime.

Later Years and Death

The late 1680s brought fragile health but sustained productivity. Behn continued to write for the theater and the press, seeking both income and influence in a turbulent period that culminated in the political upheavals of 1688, 1689. She died in London in 1689 and was buried in Westminster Abbey's East Cloister, near Poets' Corner. Her stone, often quoted by admirers and detractors alike, declares that wit is no defense against mortality, a fittingly concise epitaph for a writer who had measured the power and limits of words.

Legacy and Influence

Aphra Behn is widely recognized as one of the first English women to earn her living primarily through writing. Her example opened imaginative and professional space for later authors, including Susanna Centlivre, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood in the following decades. In the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf famously urged that women should lay flowers on Behn's grave, crediting her with securing a woman's right to speak and to be paid for it. Today she is studied as a foundational figure of Restoration drama, as a pioneering voice in the history of the novel, and as an acute witness to the entanglements of gender, empire, and commerce. The people around her, monarchs like Charles II, theatrical luminaries such as Thomas Betterton, celebrated performers including Elizabeth Barry and Nell Gwyn, and fellow writers like John Dryden, shaped the environment in which she worked. Yet Behn's most decisive influence was her own: a steady insistence that a woman's wit, deployed in public, could earn respect, provocation, and a livelihood.