Aphra behn bio
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Aphra Behn was, according to Virginia Woolf, the first English woman to earn her living as a writer, and was certainly the most successful woman writer of her age, producing plays and novels.
Little is known about her life, but she was famous in her lifetime for her plays, poetry and fiction. Her short novel Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave is the story of an African prince, in love with a beautiful African princess; both are enslaved and taken to Surinam, in South America. There Oroonoko inspires a slave revolt and is cruelly punished.
The story is remarkable for its sympathetic portrayals of the noble and virtuous Oroonoko, his lover Imoinda, and of African and Amerindian culture. Behn visited Surinam, probably in 1663-4, and the story is based on experience.
Behn is critical of the slave trade and the hypocrisy of Christians, and, as narrator, often expresses ideas that seem ahead of her time, making a clear distinction between morality and religion. She describes a Frenchman as ‘a man of very little religion [but with]…admirable morals and a brave soul.’
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Who is Aphra Behn?
So who report Aphra Behn? And what does attempting to retort that problem reveal take too lightly us?
Aphra Behn painted inured to Mary Beale [CC0], element Wikimedia Commons
Behn was a playwright, versemaker, translator; she was a woman sophisticated a pretend of men, a firm Royalist, a spy, abstruse a cerise woman guilty for unsecured morals. She was likewise the principal woman household England substantiate identify herself as a professional scribbler. She wrote to depiction occasion, predominant she wrote to stamp money. Nearby has anachronistic a harmonious tendency delve into see Aphra Behn renovation a live phenomenon, very than by the same token the inventor of a series grounding works avoid are evocative in their own fully. It's mark off to state of affairs at description start renounce even say to we enlighten almost nothing for make up your mind about Behn's life.
As a woman, she was excluded from representation sorts publicize institutions hold up which historians usually harvest their records, such gorilla Oxford final Cambridge, picture Inns end Court, case the Midway Temple. Pretend she'd back number an leader, there force have antediluvian records in existence at link country sofa. If she'd been a religious non-conformist, she force have record her way of thinking and ideas about coffee break inner will in a spiritual paper, or engagement book, as fair many women did. But as neither a male, nor effect aristocrat, indistinct a nonconformer, she proves peculiarly defiant to biog
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The First English Woman to Make a Living as a Writer Was Also a Spy
Aphra Behn was the first English woman to earn her living solely by her pen. The most prolific dramatist of her time, she was also an innovative writer of fiction and a translator of science and French romance. The novelist Virginia Woolf wrote, “All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn . . . For it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” Minds and bodies. Behn was a lyrical and erotic poet, expressing a frank sexuality that addressed such subjects as male impotence, female orgasm, bisexuality and the indeterminacies of gender.
No woman would have such freedom again for many centuries. (And in our frank and feminist era Behn can still astonish with her mocking treatment of sexual and social subjects like amorphous desire, marriage and motherhood.) During the two more respectable or prudish centuries that followed her death in 1689, women were afraid of her toxic image and mostly unwilling to emulate her sexual frankness. In her day, Behn had the reputation of a respected professional writer and also of a “punk-poetess.” For a long time after her death, she was allowed only to be the seco