Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

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by Janet Todd


  Although Behn loved the panoply of religion, she had shown little faith in other-worldly comfort, and she was not important or suggestible enough for Gilbert Burnet to give her the time he boasted of lavishing on the dying Earl of Rochester. So she looked forward to a dissolution of the body and a return to those amorphous atoms which Lucretius had seen as the essence of life and death. In her elegy for Rochester and in her translation of La Rochefoucauld, she expressed the Lucretian view of ‘Death’s eternal Night’, of ‘nox perpetua’ not the ‘lux perpetua’ of the Christian mass. In her last performed plays, one heroine declared, ‘I cou’d not have pray’d heartily if I had been dying,’ while a hero, unfazed by black magic, asserted, ‘I am for things possible and Natural.’ Behn did not feel the need of compromising an intellectually libertine life with the repentance that had allegedly terminated the Earl of Rochester’s.

  By dying in the week of William and Mary’s coronation, Behn avoided outliving her age: she would not see stately Dorset Garden, scene of all her theatrical triumphs, left to ‘rats and Mice, and perhaps an old superannuated jack-pudding to look after’, in time pulled down or ‘converted to more pious use’ to atone for its ‘levity’ and ‘transgressions’.17 Instead she had come in and out of literature within the Restoration and she would be firmly linked with its culture and theatre. It was the kind of unison of experience and history that usually occurs only in fiction, when the era and the central consciousness fade in tandem. This was as it should be, for Behn’s life, with all its trials and physical pain, had been theatrical and fictional in the highest degree.

  The small groups of witty and vicious, paradoxically potent and impotent men and women whom Behn admired and served contributed little to the political and social future beyond provoking reactionary moralities. Together, they and Behn became a hiccup in the erratic but irresistible development of English culture towards democracy, individualism, capitalism, consumerism, pursuit of happiness, human rights, the sanctity of life, spiritual craving, and family values. Yet, before the demonisation of this brutal and glittering age, Aphra Behn experienced to the full its libertarian and libertine possibilities; in it she had been allowed to experiment with styles of living and writing in the way few women could do or would wish to do for centuries to come. For Behn and for her friends, the theatre had been life and the metaphor for life. It would be a long time before any woman would again feel able to accept so thoroughly the theatricality of her demeanour or to remain so masked that nothing about her could be declared ‘authentic’. It would also be a long time before a woman would be free to ignore or criticise marriage and motherhood. Or indeed to find death grotesque and funny. Or to display state power and domination as openly erotic. Or to hate commerce and the feckless poor. Or to delight in and mock sex. Or openly to pursue pleasure and ease.

  According with her wish to settle with Orinda and Sappho, Aphra Behn did have immediate influence on women and women writers. As Virginia Woolf remarked, she had given them the ‘right to speak their minds’ and, for a short time, their bodies. A few years after her death, the writer of the prologue to her last performed play, The Younger Brother, revealed that Behn had made writing women as natural as watching women: ‘The Ladies too are always welcome here, / Let ’em in Writing or in Box appear.’ Yet, by becoming a byword for lewdness, Aphra Behn also had a negative influence on female authors, helping to construct the prevailing feminine style that would restrict their content and manner for several centuries. She had not planned that Blunt’s missing breeches in The Rover should shock a later audience and, as she said, she would have been insane if she had purposely gone about to offend popular taste, even of the future; yet perhaps to be vilified as an unfeminine woman would not much have distressed her. Although she wished to be remembered with female poets, in the last resort her desire was not to appear simply as a woman-writer at all—indeed a woman-anything. Her reiterated point was that she wrote as anyone did, and was as good as (almost) any man. Sex and gender were fluid, fun and funny, to be used, celebrated, mocked, and bent for one’s purposes, but they did not denote essential qualities. They were the subject of art not its determinants.

  Aphra Behn was buried in Westminster Abbey, probably allowed there by Thomas Sprat. With felicitous error, the burial register recorded the death not of the secretive Mrs Behn, but of the public ‘Astrea’, patron and poet of Arcadia. She was placed in an outside position, in the East cloisters ‘near the door that goes into the church’ in the words of her foster-brother, Thomas Colepeper. A few years later the slippery Tom Brown joined her there, as did the actor-manager Tom Betterton, arguably the most influential man in her life. A black marble slab was placed on her grave. Unusually for a woman it mentioned no family at all, no father, mother, sibling, husband or child, nor any place and date of birth.18

  Perhaps John Hoyle, a follower of Lucretius and doubter of the afterlife, wrote the lines inscribed below her name on the slab:

  Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be

  Defence enough against Mortality.

  But it is as likely that she made this little rhyming preparation for her own death, including reputation in the decay of the body.19 Like Keats, yearning for literary fame while declaring that his name was written on water, she too might, in mingled disillusion and hope, have denied what she most wanted. Or, since everything about Behn is equivocal, the lines may not have been referring to literary fame at all, but may simply have expressed the truth that even the wittiest of people must die.20 In later centuries, the austere, elegant gravestone was recut and is now quite legible.21 It terminates the wheelchair ramp down which schoolchildren leap to land heavily on the tomb. Not a spot for quiet contemplation, but perhaps a fitting memorial for a woman who lived in tumult and bustle.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. John Dryden, ‘Life of Lucian’, Works of John Dryden, Prose 1691–1698, vol. XX (Berkeley, 1989).

  2. W. H. Hudson, Idle Hours in a Library (San Francisco, 1897).

  3. George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, The Lady’s New Years Gift (London, 1688), p. 96.

  4. Julia Kavanagh, English Women of Letters (London, 1863), p. 22.

  5. John Doran, Their Majesties’ Servants. Annals of the English Stage (London, 1888), vol. I, p. 239.

  6. It is not strictly true that Behn was the first professional woman writer since, as Elaine Hobby has noted, there were women such as Hannah Woolley, writer of cookery and advice books, and Sarah Jinner, writer of almanacs, and no doubt others earning a living by the pen before Behn, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–88 (London, 1988). Behn was, however, the first to earn her primary living over a long period of time through writing in male and elite forms. Several women before Behn had written plays, most of these women being of noble birth and connected with coteries of writing women. In the fourteenth century Katherine Sutton, an abbess, rewrote the Easter liturgical dramas, while, in the sixteenth, Mary Herbert (née Sidney), Countess of Pembroke, wrote a pastoral in honour of Queen Elizabeth I, herself a translator of parts of plays. Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, wrote the first full-length original play by a woman, Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry. In the reign of Charles I, Queen Henrietta Maria wrote and performed plays along with her ladies-in-waiting, and, in the Interregnum, the daughters of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, and his second wife, Margaret, wrote closet plays. Just before Behn, during the Restoration, Frances Boothby and Katherine Philips exhibited their one or two plays on the public stage, and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published her closet dramas. None the less, it has been estimated that, in the seventeenth century as a whole, women’s writing made up 0.5 per cent of all works published.

  7. A Room of One’s Own (Harmondsworth, 1992), pp. 82–5. For a discussion of Woolf’s attitude to Behn, see Virginia Crompton’s dissertation ‘“Forced to write for bread and not ashamed to owne it”: Aphra Behn, Court Poetry and Professional Writing in the 1680s’ (Norwich,
1994).

  8. Maureen Duffy’, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn 1640–1688 (London, 1977) and Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (New York 1980). I am indebted to both these, especially to Duffy’s ground-breaking investigation of Behn’s early life.

  9. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York, 1981), p. 245.

  Chapter 1

  1. The Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple (London, 1942), p. 207.

  2. Bishop Burnet’s History of his Own Time (Oxford, 1833), 6 vols.

  3. The Life and Times of Anthony à Wood, antiquary of Oxford 1632–1695 described by Himself collected by Andrew Clark, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1891–1900).

  4. The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford, 1955), III, 246. Hereafter called Evelyn.

  5. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews. 10 vols. (London, 1983), vol. 11, 17 August 1661. Hereafter called Pepys.

  6. Quoted in Julia Cartwright, Sacharissa (London, 1901), p. 107.

  7. Behn would have been interested in the female commentators on the royal accession, the little known Rachel Jevon and the soon to be famous Katherine Philips or ‘Orinda’ as she was named, who composed ‘On the faire weather at the Coronacon’ in which, like Dryden, she made the sudden advent of the sun on a rainy day into the heavens shining on the crowning. For a short account of Philips, see Patrick Thomas’s introduction to volume 1 of the Collected Works of Katherine Philips, The Matchless Orinda (Stump Cross, 1990).

  8. ‘The History of the Life and Memoirs of Mrs. Behn’, published in 1698 in All the Histories and Novels Written by the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn, Entire in One Volume, the third edition of the prose works. It was printed in London for Samuel Briscoe. Henceforth it is referred to as ‘Memoirs’.

  9. Selected Poems of Anne Finch Countess of Winchilsea, ed. Katharine M. Rogers (New York, 1979), p. 72.

  10. The manuscript collection, including the ‘Circuit of Apollo’ on which the note occurs, is in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington. Despite some irritation at the apparent mystification of Behn’s background, there is evidence that Winchilsea admired some aspects of the earlier writer and was influenced by her. Unlike Katherine Philips, Finch sometimes wrote erotic pastoral in the manner of Aphra Behn.

  11. See Thomas Colepeper’s eighteen-volume manuscript ‘Adversaria’ (British Library Harley MSS 7587–7605). Behn appears in two places, as ‘Mrs Aphara Bhen’ and ‘BEENE the famos female Poet’. Hereafter BL.

  12. Some of Colepeper’s projects were feasible, such as the iron grate, some less so, such as the device to allow divers to stay underwater without air pipes. See Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1687–89, pp. 57 and 201. Hereafter CSP.

  13. The case for Eaffry Johnson has been persuasively made by Maureen Duffy in The Passionate Shepherdess.

  14. Bishops Transcripts, copy in the Centre for Kentish Studies, County Hall, Kent, Maidstone. Unhappily there is a gap in the Smeeth records of christenings from 1639 to 1662.

  15. One might speculate that George was deaf since Aphra showed an uncommon interest in sign language, introducing it into her comedies. It also occurs in a late story ascribed to her called The Dumb Virgin, where the heroine uses ‘the significative way of discourse by the Fingers’ (The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols., London, 1992–6, vol. 4, p. 344; hereafter called Works). John Lacy’s The Dumb Lady: Or, The Farriar Made Physician (1672) tells of a young lady who pretends to have been struck dumb on her wedding day and there is some association of dumbness and repression, but no one else wrote serious fiction investigating the subject. For the general interest in sign language see Kenelm Digby and George Sibscota’s The Deaf and Dumb Man’s Discourse including the Method they use, to manifest the sentiments of their Mind (1670).

  16. In the De L‘Isle Papers in the Centre for Kentish Studies, the Colepeper children are mentioned as nearly starving in London. See Chapter 2, n. 2.

  17. Elizabeth Denham was born on 28 February 1613, and George baptised in Smeeth on 22 August 1620.

  18. On his marriage licence Elizabeth and George Denham’s father was termed a ‘gentleman of Mersham’.

  19. There seems to have been no break between the families since, in later life, Elizabeth’s mother lived close to her daughter’s family. When she remarried, she was described as ‘of St. Margaret’s’, a nearby church. She may even have been sharing the Johnsons’ house. In which case Aphra grew up close to her mother’s slightly more elevated trading family.

  20. See the Canterbury Burghmote Minute Book 22 December 1648. Jane Jones was the first to alert scholars to these records in her article, ‘New Light on the Background and Early Life of Aphra Behn’, published in Notes and Queries and reprinted in Aphra Behn Studies, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 310–20.

  21. March 1649, Minute Books.

  22. 24 July 1649; court records Canterbury Cathedral Library A/C 4.

  23. The catalogue at Canterbury Cathedral Library records the Overseers’ Account Book for St. Margaret’s for the relevant period but the volume seems to be missing.

  24. There were many suggestions on how to decrease the parochial burden and silence the ‘loud noise for Liberty and Property, tho the invading that of others is only aimed at’. See A Plain and Easie Method: Shewing How the Office of Overseer of the Poor may be managed (1686).

  25. Dedication to The Roundheads (1682), Works, vol. 6, p. 362.

  26. See P. Crawford, ‘The Sucking Child: Adult Attitudes to Child Care in the First Year of Life in Seventeenth-Century England’, Continuity and Change, I, 1986.

  27. Cited in Antonia Fraser, King Charles II (London, 1993), pp. 73 and 79.

  28. The original Johnson mother may have been followed by a step-mother and the woman to whom Behn refers in her Antwerp letters may be a step-mother.

  29. The sexual point cannot be stressed, however, since many in the Restoration were fascinated by the entanglement of sexuality, power and family, especially Behn’s friend Thomas Otway.

  30. See Pedro in The Feign’d Curtizans and Trickwell in The Revenge, Works, vol. 6.

  31. In 1647, there was a riot in Canterbury over banned Christmas celebrations. The mayor, who tried to make all shops open, was thrown into the ditch. Riots broke out, which were then given a Royalist tinge. They were easily quelled. An instigator in these riots was Roger L’Estrange, the later Royalist propagandist whom Behn much admired.

  32. Her mockery was common. The end of the Rump was greeted with a volley of lampoons and broadsides on this sort of line:

  Now the Rump is confounded,

  There’s an end of the Roundhead,

  Who hath been such a bane to our Nation.

  He hath now plaid his part,

  And gone out, like a fart,

  Together with his reformation....

  Kings and Queens may appear

  Once again in our Sphere,

  Now the Knaves are turned out of door.

  ‘The Second Part of Saint George for England’, Brindley pamphlets, Huntington Library, California.

  33. In a survey of 23 Stuart women’s diaries, three-quarters were heavily devotional, see S. H. Mendelson, ‘Stuart Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs’, Women in English Society 1500–1800, ed. M. Prior (London, 1985).

  34. See Peter Lake, who contrasts ‘the formally patriarchal content of puritan ideology and the subtle ways in which the personal godliness of individual women could be invoked to subvert that patriarchalism’, ‘Feminine Piety and Personal Potency: the Emancipation of Mrs Jane Ratcliffe’, The Seventeenth Century, vol. 11, 1987, pp. 150–3.

  35. Despite her attraction to Catholicism, it is unlikely that Aphra was raised a Catholic or that she had much to do with Catholics in Kent. Bartholomew would have to have been at least nominally Protestant to hold his post and the Denhams do not appear a Catholic family. There were very few open C
atholics in the county and the faith tended to be confined to higher social ranks who could afford to maintain priests trained in foreign seminaries. The laws against Catholics were draconian though frequently unenforced. It is possible that Aphra, like the famous ‘Popish midwife’ Elizabeth Cellier, was raised a Protestant but was attracted to Rome by the excesses of anti-papist Protestants.

  36. The Emperor of the Moon (1687), Act I, Sc. I, Works, vol. 7, p. 164.

  37. The image of an infinitely bounteous nature, located sometimes in a pastoral world and sometimes simply elsewhere, might of course have been the obverse of a harsh reality. Kent was a county of great contrasts in wealth, and, as prices rose through the troubled 1640s, the Johnson family cannot have remained untouched. Those in middling circumstances would be anxious about falling lower down the scale, and rising prices must have posed both a financial and a social threat.

  38. Again Behn shows her un-Puritan tendency, for girls were informed in such tracts as Thomas Salter’s The Mirror of Modesty that they should read only pious books about ‘virtuous virgins and worthy women’ and avoid songs and sonnets. The tract also demanded that girls not lie or talk much. This could not have suited Behn either.

  39. Osborne, Letters, pp. 56 and 70.

  40. Roger North, The Lives of the Norths, ed. Augustus Jessopp (London, 1890), vol. 1, p. 46.

  41. Hannah Woolley, Gentlewoman’s Companion (London, 1675), p. 13.

  42. In England’s Pen-Man: Crocker’s New Copy-Book by Edward Crocker (1671), there are examples of various hands, Secretary, Roman, Italian and Court.

 

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