Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn: A Secret Life and what I note below relies on Todd’s work.

  claim in Oroonoko, which is, after all, a work of fiction. The first-person narrator’s claim that she went to Surinam might be true (Janet Todd believes Behn, and a lot of the circumstantial detail in Oroonoko would be hard to invent if a person had not been there), but there is much in Oroonoko that is obvious fabrication, so she might be making her trip there up as well and be relating information that she got at second hand. In addition to inventing the story of the African prince, Behn also seems to have invented the idea that her father was going to be the lieutenant governor of Surinam, as the narrator of that story claims; there is no chance that her father was ever in a position to get such a significant job, and he may very well have been dead by the time of her (purported) sojourn in Surinam. There is is no independent evidence, like a government report or a ship’s manifest, that places her in Surinam, so we cannot be certain one way or another.

Trying to make a living as a writer was difficult. It was hard then as it is now for playwrights to follow the movement of audience taste, and hard to know if the many hours of effort that go into writing and staging a play would be met with success until the moment the production was actually staged. A hit could make a fair amount of money (authors would be paid out of gate receipts and could also get money for selling the rights to the print copy of the script), but a flop could be a costly a waste of time and effort on everyone’s part. The period when Behn was writing was also a politically contentious time, and playwrights could be subject to censorship if they offended the wrong person. Writers hoped to get support from wealthy patrons, which is why almost all works of this period are prefaced by dedications, letters of extravagant praise aimed at people who the author is hoping will provide money or at least convince their wealthy friends to buy the book or attend the play. Behn was very prolific, and successful in the sense that she had many plays staged and many works published and read, but she had to keep writing to maintain herself and never seems to have made a lot of money.

One final note about Behn. In many ways, her career strikes us modern, and her prose works in particular have a lot of features that now seem to pave the way for the modern novel. But Behn was also a very conservative, traditional person. She was a staunch supporter of the Stuart monarchy and of the absolutist form of government that the Stuart kings Charles I and James II believed in. She was a woman of her time, trying to make a career as a writer and public figure in an era when this was very challenging for anyone, and especially difficult for a women from a modest background. Dramatist, poet, novelist, translator, professional: Aphra Behn left us one of the richest bodies of work of any writer of the seventeenth century.