Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn (1640–1689) was the first Englishwoman to earn her living by writing — a playwright, poet, novelist, and spy whose career broke every convention of her age. She wrote at least nineteen plays for the Restoration stage, several novels, poetry, and translations, and her novella Oroonoko (1688) is one of the earliest works of English prose fiction and one of the first literary protests against slavery. Virginia Woolf’s tribute in A Room of One’s Own — “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn… for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds” — secured her place in literary history.

Life and Career

The facts of Behn’s early life are frustratingly uncertain. She may have been born Aphra Johnson in Wye, Kent, or possibly in Canterbury; she may have traveled to Surinam as a young woman, an experience she drew on for Oroonoko. What is certain is that she married a merchant named Behn (possibly Dutch or German) who died or disappeared within a few years.

In 1666, Charles II sent her to Antwerp as a spy, using the code name “Astrea.” The mission was a fiasco — she sent valuable intelligence about Dutch naval plans but was never properly paid, and returned to England in debt. She may have been briefly imprisoned for her debts. This experience of being used and discarded by powerful men would inform her plays.

She turned to the theatre and became one of the most successful and prolific dramatists of the Restoration. The Rover (1677), a comedy of sexual intrigue set during carnival in Naples, was her greatest commercial success and features one of the liveliest heroines in Restoration comedy, Hellena, a woman who insists on choosing her own husband. The Lucky Chance (1687) defended women’s right to write for the stage in a combative preface.

Her later years were marked by illness and financial difficulty. She wrote Oroonoko — the story of an enslaved African prince — in 1688, a year before her death. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, a remarkable honour for a woman of her station, though the location of her grave in the cloisters suggests it was a modest affair.

Major Works and Themes

Oroonoko is Behn’s most enduring work: a novella that combines romance, travel narrative, and an account of slavery that is remarkable for its period, even if its anti-slavery stance is complicated by Behn’s royalist sympathies. The enslaved prince Oroonoko is noble and eloquent; his treatment by the colonists is depicted with genuine horror. The work anticipates the novel form by decades.

Her plays deal frankly with female desire, forced marriage, and the sexual double standard. She was attacked in her own time for immodesty — writing about sex with the freedom that male playwrights took for granted.

The Recovery of Aphra Behn

The story of Behn’s critical afterlife is itself a case study in literary canon formation. In her own century she was famous, successful, and respected — Dryden praised her, and her plays held the stage for decades after her death. By the mid-eighteenth century she was being dismissed as immoral and trivial: Pope included her in The Dunciad (though his contempt was probably directed at her gender as much as her work), and the Victorians effectively erased her from literary history. For two hundred years she was remembered, if at all, as a curiosity — the woman who wrote plays about sex.

The recovery began with Woolf’s 1929 tribute and accelerated through feminist literary scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s. Germaine Greer, Janet Todd, and Catherine Gallagher demonstrated that Behn’s plays were not trivial but subversive — that their sexual frankness was a deliberate challenge to the patriarchal assumption that women should not write about desire. The Rover’s Hellena is now read as a proto-feminist heroine whose insistence on choosing her own partner, in a society where women were effectively property, constitutes a radical political act.

The Oroonoko question is more complex. Behn’s sympathy for the enslaved prince is genuine, but her anti-slavery position is entangled with her royalism: Oroonoko is noble because he is literally a prince, and the critique of slavery is inseparable from a defence of aristocratic hierarchy. Modern readers must hold both truths simultaneously — that Oroonoko is one of the earliest protests against racial slavery in English and that its protest is grounded in assumptions about natural hierarchy that a modern anti-racist would reject.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Behn was immensely successful in her lifetime, forgotten for two centuries, and brilliantly recovered by feminist scholarship. Her plays are now regularly performed, and Oroonoko is a staple of university syllabi. She remains a contested figure — her politics were conservative, her sexual frankness unsettling to every generation for different reasons — but her importance is no longer in question.

Key Works

• The Rover (1677)
• The Lucky Chance (1687)
• Oroonoko (1688)

Collecting Behn

Seventeenth-century editions of Behn’s works are institutional-level rarities. The first edition of Oroonoko (1688, Will Canning) is extraordinarily rare — fewer than a dozen copies are recorded, and they almost never appear on the market. When they do, they bring prices in the tens of thousands.

The collected Plays (1702) and later eighteenth-century editions are more accessible but still rare. Serious Behn collecting is effectively limited to later scholarly editions and the occasional early quarto of individual plays.

For most collectors, the target is early editions of Oroonoko — eighteenth-century printings can be found for $500–$2,000 depending on edition and condition.