Aphra Behn
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Aphra Behn was a British playwright and poet who lived from 1640 to 1689 and also worked as a spy, making her a notable figure in 17th-century England during a period when few women had such public careers. She matters because she was one of the first women to earn her living as a writer and to achieve recognition for her dramatic works at a time when female authorship was rare and often dismissed.
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Aphra Behn (10 July 1640 – 16 April 1689) was a prolific dramatist of the Restoration and was one of the first English professional female writers. Her writing participated in the amatory fiction genre of British literature. The personal history of Aphra Behn, one of the first English women to earn her livelihood by authorship, is difficult to unravel and relate. Information regarding her, especially her early life, is scant, but she was almost certainly born in Wye <a href="https://www.last.fm
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Aphra Behn (/ˈæfrə bɛn/; bapt. 14 December 1640 – 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.
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." Her grave is not included in the Poets' Corner but lies in the East Cloister near the steps to the church.
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1640 births1689 deaths17th-century English dramatists and playwrights17th-century English novelists17th-century English poets17th-century English women writers17th-century spiesBritish literary translatorsBurials at Westminster AbbeyEnglish feminist writersEnglish spiesEnglish women dramatists and playwrights