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sketch of Behn by George Scharf from a portrait believed to be lost
Behn appears to have been born to a barber (or innkeeper) near Canterbury. Her family possessed the merest whiff of gentility, though her mother's acting as nurse to the prominent Colepeper children presumably helped her own daughter meet influential and intellectual figures, including the famous Sidney family. Through these connections, or through her father's clientele, who may have included some of the many Heugonot refugees in the region, Behn picked up French and Dutch. She seems to have spent her leisure absorbing Fench romances, like those by La Calprenede. It is speculated that at a young age, Behn became involved in espionage for the Royalist cause, through some of Colepeper's connections.
Most
(though not all) authorities believe that Behn, as the narrator of Oroonoko,
did in fact visit Suriname, perhaps in 1663/4. She may also have
seen Virginia, site of her drama The Widow Ranter. Few
believe that her father, like the narrator's, was appointed to be Lieutenant-Governor
of Suriname and the islands. She may, instead, have been there as
someone's mistress, or else as a spy. In any event, her knowledge of the
personalities of that colony seems both authentic and too intimate to be
second-hand. Of Oroonoko, there is no historical trace.
Behn's husband is a particularly misty figure, who may have actually been her lover, may have been a bona-fide husband, or may never have existed. It is possible that one Johan Behn, of the ship King David, which had sailed in the West Indies, may have met and married Aphra on the return trip from Suriname. Whether Johan quickly died or else simply separated from Aphra is unknown, but he never appears in any future episodes of her life.
In 1667, Behn
resumed (or began) her spying activities, working for Charles II in Holland.
Pursuing this end, she ran into debt, which Charles II refused to
pay. Judging from surviving letters, she was in dire financial straits,
and may have spent time in debtor's prison. If so, she quickly got o
ut
again, metamorphosed into a playwright and poet. Her first, very
successful, play was The Forced Marriage, performed at Lincoln's
Inn Fields by the Duke's Company. Although drama allowed Behn to feed
herself, she never seems to have been financially comfortable.
Nonetheless, she seems to have enjoyed the milieu, and to have been inspired by
the transgressive lives of the actresses she met, many of whom (like the famous Nell
Gwyn) combined sex work with acting. The parallels between their
careers and hers, their need to please and entertain, their dubious sexual
morality, were apparent to her, as Behn wrote plays and fictions dealing with
actresses, courtesans, and near-courtesans with whom the narrators seem
to identify.
For the next 22 years, she supported herself by her writing, producing, among
others, The Rover, The Feign'd Courtisans, Love-Letters from a
Nobleman to his Sister (called the first major epistolary novel in English),
The Fair Jilt, Oroonoko, and The Widow Ranter (staged
posthumously). Although she was a very popular, if controversial figure in
her time, even garnering for herself a burial spot in Westminster Abbey -
an honor reserved for major national figures like Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles
Dickens, and Charlotte and Emily Bronte - her popularity plummeted immediately
after her death in 1689. Behn's memory was reviled until Virginia Woolf
turned her into a feminist icon, claiming 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."
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