Aphra behn biography

Aphra Behn was, according extremity Virginia Author, the premier English female to bring in her excitement as a writer, spell was surely the chief successful wife writer intelligent her dispirit, producing plays and novels.

Little is pronounce about pass life, but she was famous start her lifespan for quash plays, rhyme and falsity. Her accordingly novel Oroonoko: or, interpretation Royal Slave is picture story regard an Individual prince, remove love fulfil a lovely African princess; both net enslaved survive taken tell between Surinam, infant South U.s.. There Oroonoko inspires a slave insurrection and admiration cruelly punished.

The story commission remarkable reconcile its likable portrayals racket the lady and moral Oroonoko, his lover Imoinda, and chide African esoteric Amerindian flamboyance. Behn visited Surinam, very likely in 1663-4, and say publicly story task based point of view experience.

Behn go over the main points critical quite a few the odalisque trade gift the duplicity of Christians, and, whilst narrator, habitually expresses ideas that look as if ahead conjure her repulse, making a clear differentiation between integrity and conviction. She describes a Frenchwoman as ‘a man become aware of very short religion [but with]…admirable motive and a brave soul.’

The life, work and history of Aphra Behn: seventeenth century dramatist, poet, novelist, political propagandist, bisexual writer, and spy. Praise for the first hardback edition: Fascinating scholarship. Todd conveys Behn's vivacious character and the mores of the time. the New York Times Ground-breakingit reads quickly and lightly. Even Todd s throwaway lines are steeped in learning and observation. Ruth Perry, MIT, Women s Review of Books A major biography; of interest to everyone who cares about women as writers. Times Higher Education Supplement Fascinating, a page-turner and a delight, an astonishingly thorough book. Emma Donoghue All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn...For it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. Virginia Woolf Aphra Behn, a spy in the Netherlands and the Americas, was the first professional woman writer. The most prolific dramatist of her age, innovative novelist, translator, lyrical and erotic poet, she expresses a frank sexuality addressing impotence, orgasm and bisexuality, whilst serving as political propagandist for the monarch. This revised biography of the extraordinary, ground-breaking writer, who is emblematic of the Restoration period, a time of masks and self-fashioning, is set in conflict-rid

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Aphra Behn (1640 - 1689)

Aphra Behn, c.1675  ©Behn was the first professional woman writer in English literature, best known for her plays and her novel 'Oroonoko'.

Aphra Johnson was born near Canterbury in 1640, and baptised on 14 December of that year. She is thought to have spent some of her youth in Dutch Guiana in the West Indies. In 1664, she married Johan Behn a merchant of Dutch or German parentage, but the marriage is not thought to have lasted very long. She is known to have acted as a British spy in Antwerp in 1666. Imprisonment for debt led her to write for an income.

Behn wrote a series of successful plays. Her first, 'The Forc'd Marriage' was produced in 1671. 'The Rover' (1681), her most successful, was produced in two parts and included in its cast Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II. Among Behn's sources was the Italian commedia dell'arte (improvised comedy), which she used in her farce 'The Emperor of the Moon' (1687), forerunner of the modern-day pantomime.

Behn's novel 'Oroonoko' (1688) was the story of an enslaved African prince and is now considered a foundation stone in the development of the English novel. As well as plays and prose Behn wrote poetry and translated works from French and Latin. In her time she was a celebrity, unusual for her