Interesting facts about a groundbreaking writer
1. Aphra Behn wrote one of the first novels in English. However, which of her works qualifies for the title ‘early novel’ is a tricky issue. The mantle usually goes to Oroonoko, her 1689 ‘true history’ of a ‘Royal Slave’, about a prince from Africa who is sold into slavery in South America, organises an uprising against the slave-owners, and is defeated and executed. But Oroonoko is short – only around 70 pages – so is often excluded from the ranks of the ‘novel’ proper. However…
2. Behn also wrote one of the first epistolary novels in English. Behn’s 1684 work Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister is long enough to be considered a novel. As it’s told in the form of letters (as the title 
reveals) it is also a precursor to celebrated eighteenth-century epistolary novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748).
3. Aphra Behn was also a government spy – and her husband may never have existed. Although she is known as ‘Aphra Behn’ (the surname has been variously pronounced as ‘ben’ and ‘bane’), she was actually born Eaffrey Johnson in 1640, the daughter of a barber. She supposedly married a Dutch (or possibly German) man named Hans Behn, who died or disappeared soon after their wedding. However, it’s possible he never existed and Behn simply wanted to create an image of herself as a young widow.
4. She was the first woman writer to be buried in Westminster Abbey. Behn died a pauper in 1689, in her late forties, and was interred in a cloister at Westminster Abbey (not far from, though not actually in, Poets’ Corner).
5. Virginia Woolf championed her in A Room of One’s Own. In her celebrated polemic of 1929 championing women’s writing, Woolf wrote: ‘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.’ The best place to begin exploring her work is, perhaps, her best-known play, the Restoration comedy The Rover, although Oroonoko is also a short read and nicely showcases Behn’s contribution to English prose fiction. Handily, both The Rover and Oroonoko are available in the excellent selection Oroonoko, the Rover and Other Works (Penguin Classics)
Image: Portrait of Aphra Behn by Mary Beale, seventeenth century, Wikimedia Commons.
Reblogged this on katywaltersreviews.
Loved this. So interesting and full of historical info.
I read Oroonoko as part of my English Literature degree where it was billed as the ‘first’ novel. Really interesting to read more about the author.
started loving her after reading the restoration play,’The Rover’ :)
I had never heard of her but found she was quite a woman to say the least. She was bold and sexual with a rye sense of humour. I downloaded some of her work from the Gutenberg site. I’m sure she lived life to the full and with courage.
‘Women enjoy’d are like Romances read , or Raree-shows once seen, meer tricks of the slight of hand, which, when found out , you wonder at yourselves for wondering so before at them. Heaven would not be Heaven, could we tell what ’tis.’
Apparently Raree-shows were the fore-runners of peep shows .