Literary firsts: Aphra Behn

This week, I’m kicking off a new subset of fun fact posts about literary firsts: a brief look at some of the people and texts that broke new ground in the history of literature. There’s no particular order or limit of scope other than my own knowledge, so feel free to suggest a literary first for me to research if you have one you’d really like me to cover!

To start us off, I’m going to talk about Aphra Behn, one of England’s first professional female writers. She explored the very new form of the novel, and broke into the “boys’ club” that was playwriting in the 17th century with great success. She also happened to be a spy for the government… but she was honestly a lot better at writing.

Behn was born in Canterbury in 1640, just before the English Civil War broke out. Like many people of the period, her early life is a bit hazy. We do know that she spent some time as young woman living in the South American colony of Surinam, an experience that she would later use as inspiration for her novel Oroonoko or, The Royal Slave. Either before or shortly following her return to England, she married a man name Johan Behn; the marriage didn’t last very long, but (Aphra) Behn clearly liked the name, as she used it for the rest of her life.

By the middle of the 1660s, Behn had started making connections at court, and was tapped to perform some espionage against the Dutch, with whom England was currently at war. She was, alas, not terribly successful as a spy, nor was it an especially lucrative career, so she returned to London in debt; it was to pay those debts that she turned to writing in a professional capacity.

The world that Behn found her place in—particularly as a playwright—was one that was brimming with new life. The theatres had been closed during the rule of Oliver Cromwell and his puritanical government following the Civil War, but when the monarchy was restored and Charles II swept in from France to take his throne, he brought with him a love for all sorts of entertainments, theatre included. Not only did he have the theatres reopened, he also instituted some new ideas from the Continent (how exotic).

One particularly notable difference was that women were now permitted to be professional actors. In the days of Shakespeare, less than a century earlier, actresses were considered tantamount to sex workers, and therefore highly inappropriate to be shown onstage. France had never had such qualms, and neither did Charles, who was infamous for his love of certain actresses. But then, plays were also becoming more openly raunchy anyway—not to say that the Elizabethans and Jacobeans weren’t incredibly horny in their works, but during the Restoration period sex very much took a front seat.

In addition to her groundbreaking and much acclaimed novel Oroonoko, Behn was also a prolific playwright, producing hits such as The Rover, The Forc’d Marriage, and The False Count. She engaged with the same conventions and plot devices as her male counterparts, with significant success, but her unique female perspective inspired her to subvert some of the misogynistic and male-centric views that were common in plays of the time, making her female characters mouthpieces for women and their experiences.

Behn’s focus on women’s sexuality in her plays garnered a lot of criticism from her peers (awfully rich considering the stuff they were putting out), but she was nevertheless instrumental in paving the way for more female writers to follow in her footsteps, and she has in more recent decades been examined through a feminist lens and acknowledged, quite rightly, as being a significant female writer in English history.