Aphra Behn: The Incomparable Astrea

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This prolific English author, poet, and memoirist in the early 20th century lived not so privately. Women, education, and agency, 1600–2000. Jean Spence, Sarah Jane Aiston, Maureen M. Meikle. New York: Routledge. 2010. ISBN 978-0-415-99005-9. OCLC 298467847. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: others ( link)

One of her best-known verses, happily juxtaposed to " The Disappointment ," is " The Willing Mistriss ." This poem describes how the female speaker becomes so aroused by the excellent courtship of her lover that she is "willing to receive / That which I dare not name." After three verses describing their lovemaking, she concludes with the coy suggestion, "Ah who can guess the rest?" The poem is a good example of Behn's treatment of conventional courtly and pastoral modes, as is " Love Armed ," which describes Cupid's power to enamour. Writer Germaine Greer has called Behn "a palimpsest; she has scratched herself out," and biographer Janet Todd noted that Behn "has a lethal combination of obscurity, secrecy and staginess which makes her an uneasy fit for any narrative, speculative or factual. She is not so much a woman to be unmasked as an unending combination of masks". [13] Her name is not mentioned in tax or church records. [13] During her lifetime she was also known as Ann Behn, Mrs Behn, agent 160 and Astrea. [14] Career [ edit ] A sketch of Aphra Behn by George Scharf from a portrait believed to be lost (1873)The Younger Brother: Or, The Amorous Jilt. A Comedy, Acted at the Theatre Royal, By His Majesty's Servants (London: Printed for J. Harris & sold by R. Baldwin, 1696). Business and the rules of honor are also rejected in favor of a natural and easy "Love" in the poem "A Farewel to Celladon, On his Going into Ireland." These verses ask Celladon why he bothers with boring government business ("To Toyl, be Dull, and to be Great"), when he knows that success will not bring happiness. It is more important, the speaker advises him, to enjoy the company of his close good friend, Damon, to whom Celladon is "by Sacred Friendship ty'd," and from whom "Love nor Fate can nere divide" him. The tradition of close male friendships has both a literary and social history based in the classics. In this "Pindarique," Behn elevates such a relationship over politics and commerce. In her other poems as well, there is a precedence of close personal relationships over public enterprise. The portrayal of many of these relationships is in the classical pastoral tradition, and several of the poems also present the classical concept of the person with attributes of both sexes, the androgyne or hermaphrodite. Behn took many lovers throughout her life, but one of her most famous was the feisty lawyer John Hoyle. Sadly, their relationship was full of heartbreak. The hard-living Hoyle had a penchant for getting into violent bar fights, and Behn wrote frequently about and to her bad boy, admonishing him for his “depraved ways.” Behn writes, then, as the representative of all women, allying herself openly with women against men in the war conventionally called love. She tells her friend Carola, "Lady Morland at Tunbridge," that even though she is a rival for Behn's lover, when she saw her, she grew to admire and love her. Because of that, she warns, beware of taking my lover as your own—he is experienced and can slip the chains of love. You deserve a virgin, she says, someone who has never loved before, who only has eyes for you and has a "soul as Great as you are Fair." So in the context of this division of emphasis in recent Anglo-American criticism, Todd's construction of the 'political' Behn is not an unpartisan contribution to current debate. In presenting Behn as a Tory polemicist who was much engaged with the specific power struggles of the 1670s and 80s, she offers a biographical justification for her own school of historical criticism on Behn.

Lizbeth Goodman; W.R. Owens (2013). Shakespeare, Aphra Behn and the Canon. Routledge. p.141. ISBN 978-1135636289. Todd, Janet; Todd, Professor of English Literature Janet (28 March 1996). Aphra Behn Studies. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-47169-5. The most famous example of this authorial self-revelation is in her use of the narrator in Oroonoko. In this fiction, we see Behn clearly inserting herself into the narrative, as both agent and observer. She begins the account by declaring that: All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds... 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. [41]

15. Having Nun of It

a b c d e f g h i j k Hughes, Derek; Todd, Janet, eds. (2004). The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn. Cambridge University. pp. 1–10. ISBN 978-0521527200. Who are some of your own favorite trailblazing women throughout history? Let us know in the comments! Lizbeth Goodman; W.R. Owens (2013). Shakespeare, Aphra Behn and the Canon. Routledge. p.140. ISBN 978-1135636289.

From 11-13 July, the four shortlisted designs, in the form of maquettes cast in scale (50cm) in bronze (pictured above), can be seen in the courtyard of The Royal Exchange. Visitors can then vote for their favourite. The quartet are Maurice Blik’s Mind Over Matter, Meredith Bergmann’s The Untamed Heart, Christine Charlesworth’s Aphra: Poet, Playwright, Pioneer and Victoria Atkinson’s Astrea. The winning design will then be commissioned as a full-size statue to be erected in the very heart of Canterbury, as a permanent tribute to Aphra Behn’s life and works. In Angeline Goreau's 1980 biography of Behn, Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn, Behn's biography symbolizes the lives of feminists in 1980, who, like Goreau, long to be free, and must suffer because of that desire. The minimal facts that are available about Behn's life need to be reconstructed to form a tale that projects the predicament of the modern feminist scholar onto earlier women writers. Both the bawdy and self-reliant Aphra Behn imagined by the Bloomsburies and the confident radical of Woodman's work have been replaced: Behn is depicted as a defensive woman, beset by critics, who must suffer for her art.Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. "The Caribbean: From a Sea Basin to an Atlantic Network." The Southern Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 4, 2018, pp.196–206. No wonder he was fascinated by her, there was enough material for several novels about her protean life. Her biographer Janet Todd called her a “shapeshifter” and described her as ‘playwright, poet, fictionist, propagandist and spy’ who hid her true self behind a series of masks. Of course, Behn might have been unknown to a callow teenager like me, but she had already been re-discovered and hailed a proto-feminist role model who lived life on her own terms at a time when for most women those terms were laid down by men. Virginia Woolf famously wrote in A Room of One’s Own: ‘All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn …. for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.’ Hutner, Heidi, ed. (1993). Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism. University of Virginia Press. p.2. ISBN 978-0813914435.