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Learning Objectives

In this chapter you will learn about an early English woman writer Aphra Behn. You will also be acquainted  with the specific situation of one of the first female authors who earned her living through writing. In the second part, you will study a modernist writer – Virginia Woolf, who reflected upon the challenges of female authorship in her essay “A Room of One’s Own”. You will also learn how Woolf celebrated Behn in the aforementioned essay. This way, you will gain new knowledge on the importance of female literary ancestors.

Aphra Behn by Peter Lely ca. 1670, Wikipedia

Aphra Behn, (born 1640?, Harbledown?, Kent, Eng.—died April 16, 1689, London), English dramatist, fiction writer, and poet who was the first Englishwoman known to earn her living by writing.

Her origin remains a mystery, in part because Behn may have deliberately obscured her early life. One tradition identifies Behn as a child known only as Ayfara or Aphra, who traveled in the 1650s with a couple named Amis to Suriname, which was then an English possession. She was more likely the daughter of a barber, Bartholomew Johnson, who may or may not have sailed with her and the rest of her family to Suriname in 1663. She returned to England in 1664 and married a merchant named Behn; he died (or the couple separated) soon after. Because of her wit and talent she was hold in high esteem, namely, she was employed by King Charles II in secret service in the Netherlands in 1666. Unrewarded and briefly imprisoned for debt, she began to write to support herself.

Behn’s early works were tragicomedies in verse. In 1670 her first playThe Forc’d Marriage, was produced, and The Amorous Prince  followed a year later. Her sole tragedy, Abdelazer, was staged in 1676. However, she turned increasingly to light comedy and farce over the course of the 1670s. Many of these witty and vivacious comedies, notably The Rover (two parts, produced in 1677 and 1681), were commercially successful. The Rover depicts the adventures of a small group of English Cavaliers in Madrid and Naples during the exile of the future Charles II. The Emperor of the Moon, first performed in 1687, presaged the harlequinade, a form of comic theatre that evolved into the English pantomime.

Activity 1

Learn more about Aphra Behn by listening to the BBC podcast.

 

Activity 2

Please, answer the questions below:

What was Aphra Behn’s family background? How did she receive her education?

Where did she travel and why?

What was her artistic name?

What are the titles of her works? Which genres did she choose?

Were there any other female playwrights in her time?

Activity 3

By listening to the podcast and answering the questions you have learned some important facts about one of the most inspiring women writers in the literary history.

Before reading Virginia Woolf’s text about her in the Essay “A Room of One’s Own”, learn more about it.

Watch the video:

An Introduction to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

Audio book 

Now you are going to read an excerpt from Woolf’s essay about Behn. Perhaps there will be some names and titles in the texts where you will need to look for an additional information in the internet.

Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own

And with Mrs Behn we turn a very important corner on the road. We leave behind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those solitary great ladies who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight alone. We come to town and rub shoulders with ordinary people in the streets. Mrs Behn was a middle–class woman with all the plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and courage; a woman forced by the death of her husband and some unfortunate adventures of her own to make her living by her wits. She had to work on equal terms with men. She made, by working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote, even the splendid ‘A Thousand Martyrs I have made’, or ‘Love in Fantastic Triumph sat’, for here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes. For now that Aphra Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen. Of course the answer for many years to come was, Yes, by living the life of Aphra Behn! Death would be better! and the door was slammed faster than ever. That profoundly interesting subject, the value that men set upon women’s chastity and its effect upon their education, here suggests itself for discussion, and might provide an interesting book if any student at Girton or Newnham* cared to go into the matter. Lady Dudley, sitting in diamonds among the midges of a Scottish moor, might serve for frontispiece. Lord Dudley, THE TIMES said when Lady Dudley died the other day, ‘a man of cultivated taste and many accomplishments, was benevolent and bountiful, but whimsically despotic. He insisted upon his wife’s wearing full dress, even at the remotest shooting–lodge in the Highlands; he loaded her with gorgeous jewels’, and so on, ‘he gave her everything—always excepting any measure of responsibility’. Then Lord Dudley had a stroke and she nursed him and ruled his estates with supreme competence for ever after. That whimsical despotism was in the nineteenth century too.

But to return. Aphra Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind, but was of practical importance. A husband might die, or some disaster overtake the family. Hundreds of women began as the eighteenth century drew on to add to their pin money, or to come to the rescue of their families by making translations or writing the innumerable bad novels which have ceased to be recorded even in text–books, but are to be picked up in the fourpenny boxes in the Charing Cross Road. The extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth century among women—the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the translating of the classics—was founded on the solid fact that women could make money by writing. Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for. It might still be well to sneer at ‘blue stockings with an itch for scribbling’,* but it could not be denied that they could put money in their purses. Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses.

The middle–class woman began to write. For if PRIDE AND PREJUDICE  matters, and MIDDLEMARCH and VILLETTE and WUTHERING HEIGHTS matter, then it matters far more than I can prove in an hour’s discourse that women generally, and not merely the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers, took to writing. Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter—the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek.

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. It is she—shady and amorous as she was—who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you to–night: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.

Viriginia Woolf in 1902, Wikipedia

Activity 4

Please, answer following questions:

What was hidden behind the remark “Yes, by living the life of Aphra Behn! Death would be better!” expressed by the parents when the daughter decides to write and live from her pen?

Who are the writers that are, according to Woolf, foremothers of the 19th century women writers? Find more information about them.

 

The witty eloquence of Virginia Woolf must have awoken your interest in learning more about her. Find more information about her life and works on the Internet and watch the Virginia Woolf documentary.

Activity 5

Please, answer following questions:

If you compare Woolf to Behn, how different was their family background and educational background?

Why is Woolf considered to be one of the most important novelists of the 20th century?

How did Woolf transgress and subvert the rules of the biographical genre in Orlando?

Activity 6

Your final task in this chapter is to find information about other receptions of Aphra Behn in the VRE Women Writers.

Creativity task: write an essay or a poem or make a photo or a painting or a video using this title:

This is a flower I would put upon Aphra Behn’s tomb

Further Redings and Listenings

Michael Cunningham: The Hours (1998).

Video about A Room of One’s Own (Paddy Crowe, Prof. Connell Fanning and Dr. Laura Aguiar).

 

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