Aphra Behn (1650-1689)

From English Literature 1640-1789: An Anthology, ed. Robert DeMaria, Jr.

Poet, playwright, novelist, and translator, Aphra Behn was among the most versatile writers of her time. She is probably the first woman ever to make a living as a writer, and she was the first woman to be memorialized as a writer in Westminster Abbey. In surveying the history of English literature from her vantage point as a woman in the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf would find in Behn a most important early advocate for the place of women in the world of letters.

Although the facts of Behn's early life are uncertain, she seems to have been born Aphra Johnson, and it is likely that as a young woman whe travelled to Surinam or British Guiana. She places herself ther amidst the scene of much of the action of her most famous novel, Oroonoko. On her return to England she probably married a merchant named Behn, whose family was Dutch. Shortly thereafter, from 1666-7, Behn was in Antwerp as a spy for the English government under the code name "Astrea," which she later used as her literary name. At some point early on her husband died or abandoned her, for she was briefly in debtor's prison in 1667. Not long after this, Behn began writing for a living: remarkably, she published over thirty separate volumes or pamphlets between 1676 and 1689, including an enormous epistolary novel that presents a recent scandal in a thinly veiled fiction [Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister]. Her work as a playwright began before this period of massive publication and continued deep into it. Behn wrote at least nineteen plays, the first of which to be published was The Forced Marriage (1670). The Rover, perhaps Behn's best play, was popular enough to support a sequel. The Rover is a romantic comedy about temporarily disenfranchised English Cavaliers and their escapades in the masquerad world of Venice at Carnival time. Like some of Behn's poetry, The Rover displays a mastery of sexual innuendo and bawdiness that is much more common in male writers and conventionally thought to be inappropriate in women. Contemporary satirical writings, like that of Thomas Brown, and later accounts, including the article in the Dictionary of National Biography, express dismay about Behn's morals. Happily, interest has lately returned to her diverse literary output, and perhaps most of all to her novel Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave. 

There is an obvious temptation to read Oroonoko as a manifesto of anti-slavery, anti-colonialist, egalitarian, and perhaps even proto-feminist values, but the novel also has qualities that should appeal to those who are not interested in its usefulness to a political agenda. Although Behn draws on her knowledge of some historical incidents and persons, in genre the work is a romance, a popular fictional form designed to appeal to women and to members of the recently educated middle class. Oroonoko was certainly meant to be popular; but in a startling reversal of stereotypes, Behn substitutes Africans for the European nobles that traditionally take the lead roles in seventeenth-century romances. Yet, in many respects, Prince Oroonoko and his bride are nobler and more traditional than their European counterparts, and the work can be read as profoundly conservative, even though it is concerned with the injustices of the colonial system. Behn's politics always revolved around her extremely loyal royalism, which was not in conflict, for her, with her observations on the inequality of women, her obvious hatred of slavery, or her tacit campaign for the empowerment of women in the public as well as the private sphere. In short, when one tries to interpret Oroonoko, it resists easy solutions and displays some of the complexity and difficulty that many conservative critics think of as one of the defining qualities of art. Such complexity is not always evident in the language or the plot of the novel, but the book has all kinds of value for students of literature. In addition to its other virtues, Oroonoko shows the old, largely upper-class genre of the romance, in the process of transforming itself into a work with a broader social horizon and less parochial interests.


The text of Oroonoko is based on the first edition (1688). Most of the poems presented here come from Poems upon Several Occasions (1684). However, the text of "To the Fair Clorinda" is based on the version that appeared in Lycidus: or the Lover in Fashion (London, 1688), and both "Epitaph on the Tombstone of a Child" and "Ovid to Julia" come from Miscellany, Being a Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1685). The Works are being edited by Janet  Todd (Ohio State University Press, 1992- ). I am indebted to Dod's notes on the poetry and on Oroonoko. There is a fairly recent critical biography by Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra (1980).

Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave

—oOo—