Born [Aphra Johnson], at Wye, Kent, 10 July 1640. Taken to West Indies early in life. Returned to England, 1658. Married to —— Behn, 1660[?]. In favour with Charles II.; sent by him on secret service to Antwerp, 1665. On return to England took to playwriting. First play produced at Duke’s Theatre, 1671. Various plays produced, 1671–78, 1681–87. Died, in London, 16 April, 1689. Buried in Westminster Abbey. Works: “The Forc’d Marriage,” 1671; “The Amorous Prince,” 1671; “The Dutch Lover,” 1673; “Abdelazar,” 1677; “The Rover,” pt. i. (anon.), 1677; pt. ii., 1681; “The Debauchee” (anon.), 1677; “The Town Fop,” 1677; “Sir Patient Fancy,” 1678; “The Feign’d Curtizana,” 1679; “The Roundheads,” 1682; “The City Heiress,” 1682; “The False Count,” 1682; “The Young King,” 1683; “Poems upon several occasions,” 1684; “The Adventures of the Black Lady,” 1684; two “Pindarick Poems” and a poem to the Queen Dowager, 1685; “La Montre,” 1686; “Emperor of the Moon,” 1687; “The Lucky Chance,” 1687; “Lycidus,” 1688; “A Poem to Sir Roger L’Estrange,” 1688; Three “Congratulatory Poems” to the Queen, 1688; “The Lucky Mistake,” 1689; “Congratulatory Poem” to the Queen, 1689. Posthumous: “The Widow Renter,” ed. by “G. J.,” 1690; “The Younger Brother,” ed. by Gildon, 1696; “The Lady’s Looking Glass,” 1697. She translated: (with others) Ovid’s “Heroical Epistles,” 1683; Fontenelle’s “Discovery of New Worlds,” 1688; Van Dale’s “History of Oracles,” 1699; and edited “Miscellany,” 1685. Collected Works: “Poetical Remains,” ed. by Gildon, 1698; “Histories and Novels,” 1698; “Plays,” 1702; “Plays, Histories and Novels … with Life” (6 vols.), 1871.
Personal
Poetry, the supreme pleasure of the mind, is begot, and born in pleasure, but oppressed and killed with pain. This reflexion ought to raise our admiration of Mrs. Behn, whose genius was of that force, to maintain its gaiety in the midst of disappointments, which a woman of her sense and merit ought never to have met with. But she had a great strength of mind, and command of thought, being able to write in the midst of company, and yet have the share of the conversation: which I saw her do in writing “Oroonoko,” and other parts of her works, in every part of which you’ll find an easy stile and a peculiar happiness of thinking. The passions, that of love especially, she was mistress of, and gave us such nice and tender touches of them, that without her name we might discover the author.
Aphra Behn was a graceful, comely woman, with brown hair and bright eyes, and was painted so in an existing portrait of her by John Ripley. She is said to have introduced milk punch into England. She deserves our sympathy as a warm-hearted, gifted, and industrious woman, who was forced by circumstance and temperament to win her livelihood in a profession where scandalous writing was at that time obligatory. It is impossible, with what we know regarding her life, to defend her manners as correct or her attitude to the world as delicate. But we may be sure that a woman so witty, so active, and so versatile, was not degraded, though she might be lamentably unconventional. She was the George Sand of the Restoration, the “chère maître” to such men as Dryden, Otway, and Southerne, who all honoured her with their friendship. Her genius and vivacity were undoubted; her plays are very coarse, but very lively and humorous, while she possessed an indisputable touch of lyric genius. Her prose works are decidedly less meritorious than her dramas and the best of her poems.
Despite the offensiveness of her writings,… is personally a sympathetic figure…. Her eighteen plays, have, with few exceptions, sufficient merit to entitle her to a respectable place among the dramatists of her age, and sufficient indelicacy to be unreadable in this. It may well be believed, on the authority of a female friend, that the authoress “had wit, humour, good-nature, and judgment; was mistress of all the pleasing arts of conversation; was a woman of sense, and consequently a woman of pleasure.” She was buried in Westminster Abbey, but not in Poets’ Corner.
Oroonoko
She had a great command of the stage, and I have often wondered that she would bury her favourite hero in a novel, when she might have revived him in the scene. She thought either, that no actor could represent him, or she could not bear him represented; and I believed the last, when I remember what I have heard from a friend of her’s, that she always told a story more feelingly than she writ.
I have said that “Oroonoko” is the best known of Mrs. Behn’s novels, but I doubt whether more than a very few of the present generation have read or even seen it, and I had some difficulty in procuring a copy.
The tragic and pathetic story of “Oroonoko” does only less credit to her excellent literary ability than to the noble impulse of womanly compassion and womanly horror which informs the whole narrative and makes of it one ardent and continuous appeal for sympathy and pity, one fervent and impassioned protest against cruelty and tyranny.
Posterity is content to know that Astræa trod the stage loosely, and so she gets no credit for the merits of her novels. Yet these merits are real, for Mrs. Aphra Behn had passed her childhood in Surinam, where her father was governor; for some years after the Restoration she had lived at Antwerp as a Government agent; and it was on sundry experiences in these two places that she based her two best-known novels, published in 1698, after her death,—“Oroonoko” and “The Fair Jilt.” For making use of incidents of real life in the service of fiction at a time when the heroic romance was at the height of its vogue, she deserves all credit. And yet it was no literary reform that she effected…. The story of “Oroonoko,” the love-lorn and magnanimous negro, of “very little religion” but “admirable morals,” who meets a tragic death, belongs to a class of romance that flourished almost a century later, when Rousseau had given popularity to the philosophical ideas that underlie it. In this novel Mrs. Behn is one of the early precursors of the romantic revival, and finds her logical place in that movement. But her bold conduct of a simple story and her popularity with her contemporaries entitle her also to claim a share in the attempt, faint and ineffective, that the later seventeenth century witnessed, to bring romance into closer relation with contemporary life.
“Oroonoko” is the first humanitarian novel in English. Though its spirit cannot for a moment be compared, in moral earnestness, with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” yet its purpose was to awaken Christendom to the horrors of slavery. The time being not yet ripe for it, the romance was for the public merely an interesting story to be dramatized.
General
I was desired to say that the author, who is of the fair sex, understood not Latin; but if she do not, I am afraid she has given us occasion to be ashamed who do.
| But when you write of Love, Astrea, then | |
| Love dips his Arrows, where you wet your pen. | |
| Such charming Lines did never Paper grace; | |
| Soft as your Sex; and smooth as Beauty’s Face. |
A Person lately deceased, but whose Memory will be long fresh amongst the Lovers of Dramatick Poetry, as having been sufficiently Eminent not only for her Theatrical Performances, but several other Pieces both in Verse and Prose; which gain’d her an Esteem among the Wits, almost equal to that of the incomparable Orinda, Madam Katharine Phillips…. Most of her Comedies have had the good fortune to please: and tho’ it must be confest that she has borrow’d very much, not only from her own Country Men, but likewise from the French Poets: yet it may be said in her behalf, that she has often been forc’d to it through hast: and has borrow’d from others Stores, rather of Choice than for want of a fond of Wit of her own: it having been formerly her unhappiness to be necessitated to write for Bread, as she has publisht to the world. ’Tis also to her Commendation, that whatever she borrows she improves for the better: a Plea which our late Laureat has not been asham’d to make use of. If to this, her Sex may plead in her behalf, I doubt not but she will be allowed equal with several of our Poets her Contemporaries.
| The stage how loosely does Astræa tread, | |
| Who fairly puts all characters to bed! |
This young fellow lay in bed, reading one of Mrs. Behn’s novels, for he had been instructed by a friend that he could not find a more effectual method of recommending himself to ladies, than by improving his understanding, and filling his mind with good literature.
Mrs. Behn perhaps, as much as any one, condemned loose scenes, and too warm descriptions; but something must be allowed to human frailty. She herself was of an amorous complexion, she felt the passions intimately which she describes, and this circumstance added to necessity, might be the occasion of her plays being of that cast.
Her plays, which are numerous, abound with obscenity; and her novels are little better. Mr. Pope speaks thus of her:
| “The stage how loosely does Astræa tread, | |
| Who fairly puts all characters to bed!” |
A grand-aunt of my own, Mrs. Keith of Ravelstone, who was a person of some condition, being a daughter of Sir John Swinton of Swinton—lived with unabated vigour of intellect to a very advanced age. She was very fond of reading, and enjoyed it to the last of her long life. One day she asked me, when we happened to be alone together, whether I had ever seen Mrs. Behn’s novels?—I confessed the charge.—Whether I could get her a sight of them?—I said, with some hesitation, I believed I could; but that I did not think she would like either the manners, or the language, which approached too near that of Charles II.’s time to be quite proper reading. “Nevertheless,” said the good old lady, “I remember them being so much admired, and being so much interested in them myself, that I wish to look at them again.” To hear was to obey. So I sent Mrs. Aphra Behn, curiously sealed up, with “private and confidential” on the packet, to my gay old grand-aunt. The next time I saw her afterwards, she gave me back Aphra, properly wrapped up, with nearly these words:—“Take back your bonny Mrs. Behn; and, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I found it impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not,” she said, “a very odd thing, that I, an old woman of eighty and upwards, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which, sixty years ago, I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London?”
Her verses are natural and cordial, written in a masculine style, and yet womanly withal. If she had given us nothing but such poetry as this [“Love Armed”], she would have been as much admired, and known among us all, to this day, as she consented to be among the rakes of her time. Her comedies indeed are alarming, and justly incurred the censure of Pope: though it is probable, that a thoughtless good-humor made her pen run over, rather than real licentiousness; and that, although free enough in her life, she was not so “extravagant and erring” as persons with less mind.
Her name would have been excluded from all mention in these pages, had it not been necessary to mark the true state of female literature at this period. Aphara Behn is the first English authoress upon record whose life was openly wrong, and whose writings were obscene.
In eighteen years she saw nineteen of her dramas applauded or hissed by the debauched and idle groundlings of the Duke’s Theatre; and forced to write what would please, she wrote in a style that has put a later generation very justly to the blush. But in power of sustained production she surpassed all her contemporaries expect Dryden, since beside this ample list of plays, she published eight novels, some collections of poetry, and various miscellaneous volumes. The bulk of her writings, and the sustained force so considerable a body of literature displays, are more marked than the quality of her style, which is very irregular, uncertain and untutored. She possessed none of that command over her pen which a university training had secured to the best male poets of her time. But she has moments of extraordinary fire and audacity, when her verse throws off its languor, and progresses with harmony and passion. Her one long poem, “The Voyage to the Isle of Love,” which extends to more than two thousand lines, is a sentimental allegory, in a vague and tawdry style, almost wholly without value; her best pieces occur here and there in her plays and among her miscellaneous poems. It is very unfortunate that one who is certainly to be numbered, as far as intellectual capacity goes, in the first rank of English female writers, should have done her best to remove her name from the recollection of posterity by the indelicacy and indiscretion of her language.
It is a pity, almost, that the next name must have a place accorded to it; certainly a pity that beside any records of what the more exalted spirit of woman has achieved, mention should be made of so unsexed a writer as Mrs. Aphra Behn. Yet she was a woman, writing much that was vigorous and a little that was poetical, and so must needs be catalogued among the verse writers with whom it is the business of these pages to deal.
She was an undoubted wit, and was never dull, but so wicked and coarse that she forfeited all right to fame.
Her plays have in relation to those of her contemporaries a rather unfair reputation for license, but are of small literary worth. Her prose has much merit, and she ranks early and high in the list of English novelists.
Dryden, the greatest and most various representative of his age at its best and at its worst, is not for a moment comparable as a song-writer to Lord Rochester or to Mrs. Behn…. Like Marcus Cato’s or Joseph Addison’s Marcia “the virtuous Aphra towers above her sex” in the passionate grace and splendid elegance of that melodious and magnificent song (“Love in fantastic triumph sat”) to which Leigh Hunt alone among critics has ever done justice—and has done no more than justice in the fervour of his impassioned panegyric.
Mrs. Behn wrote foully; and this for most of us, and very properly, is an end of the whole discussion.
