In the Victorian period she suffered from the general distaste for the rakish Restoration and by 1883 Eric Robertson, compiling his English Poetesses, could hardly bring himself to contemplate the horrific impurity of Aphra Behn. Her slow rehabilitation in this century owes much to Montague Summers’s impressive but incomplete and flawed collection of her work in 1915 and the references to her in Virginia Woolf’s 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.’4 But it took a long time for women to avail themselves of the right to frank moral and erotic expression, and only recently has Behn’s contribution to female writing begun to receive adequate appreciation.

For an author so famous or notorious surprisingly little is known of her life, which spreads in a shadowy way across the continents. Her association with the West Indies now seems documented, as does her short period of espionage in Antwerp, but it is also possible that she spent time in Virginia and Italy and lived some of her childhood in Flanders. The main clue to her early years comes from the anonymous ‘Life and Memoirs’ prefixed to a posthumous edition of her work in 1696. This announces that she was a ‘gentlewoman’ of good family from Canterbury and called Johnson. It immediately throws some doubt on the generally accepted date of birth, 1640, when it claims that Aphra Behn was too young to respond to amorous youths just before her journey to Surinam in 1663. When this is placed beside her pleading of her youth during her espionage in 1666, it might suggest a later birth date; in the Restoration world girls like Nell Gwyn began their amorous and professional careers in their early teens.

Speculation on Aphra Behn’s status and childhood follows two main courses. The first is influenced by contemporary testimonies, one from the poet Ann Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, who claimed in a marginal note to one of her poems that Aphra Behn was the daughter of a barber, and the other from the rather eccentric Colonel Colepeper who reported in his huge manuscript books of scientific jottings, lineages and legal documents that Behn’s mother had been his nurse ‘and gave him suck for some time’. The two accounts can be reconciled if Aphra Behn is the Aphra Johnson born to a barber, Bartholomew Johnson, and the probably illiterate Elizabeth Denham in 1640; she would then be sister of Frances whose birth would be close enough to that of Colepeper’s sister for the wet-nursing to have taken place. If this is indeed Aphra Behn, then she is of humbler birth than the ‘Memoirs’ suggest, although her mother’s family had some claim to a gentlemanly status; it is possible that her extraordinary education and language skills came through contact with the orphaned Colepeper children and their aristocratic relatives – who included many of the later dedicatees of her works – and through association with Huguenot and Dutch immigrants in Canterbury. The other, perhaps more fanciful line of speculation has concentrated on Behn’s literary sophistication, her seeming knowledge of political events on the Continent, her possible experience of Roman Catholicism, her easy association with courtiers when she first began writing in London, and her lifelong commitment to the aristocratic principle, to put forward a more glamorous background depending on distant relationships with the famous Sidney and Howard families and a possible sojourn in a Catholic establishment in Flanders. In this scenario Behn becomes aligned with two of the most famous literary women of the immediate past, the Countess of Pembroke and Lady Mary Wroth. In The History of the Nun (1689), the narrator claims to have been ‘designed an humble votary in the house of devotion’, though she chose to deny herself ‘that content’; so far, none of the autobiographical claims made by the narrators of Behn’s late fiction has been conclusively proved false or true.5

It is difficult to infer background from opinion. Behn’s lifelong faith in the aristocratic principle might suggest some noble connection, but it might also indicate inclination and desire, and it could be argued that the principle manifested itself for her more in style and culture than in political doctrine and relationship. So also with religion, which often appears a matter of style as much as of content. Behn admired the baroque side of Catholicism and avoided much overt piety and concern with substance. Indeed in many works she puts forward a vigorous and sometimes sceptical rationalism and she rails against those who would unsettle the state with religious squabbling. Perhaps she was converted to Roman Catholicism late in life since her approving references to it tend to come from her later works, as do the dedications to notable Catholics, such as Lord Maitland for Oroonoko and Henry Nevil Payne for The Fair Jilt. But her burial in the Anglican Westminster Abbey suggests that, whatever her private opinions, she did not need to make a public profession of them.

In 1663 a royal grant gave the exploration of Surinam to Lord Willoughby. According to the ‘Memoirs’, shortly afterwards Aphra Behn travelled to Surinam where it was claimed that her father had been appointed ‘Lieutenant-General’ of many islands and ‘the continent of Surinam’ because of his relationship to Lord Willoughby. He apparently died on the passage out, leaving his family to await a ship back to England. Hints of Aphra Behn’s stay in the colony come from Oroonoko, written decades later when Surinam had been lost to the Dutch. This story describes the family’s stay in the most substantial house in the colony and their meeting with many characters who were historical personages, including the royalist but ignoble villain of the tale, William Byam, Lord Willoughby’s deputy, as well as the good John Treffry, overseer of Willoughby’s plantation, and George Marten, a planter in the colony; there is as yet no historical corroboration for the romantic figure of the noble prince Oroonoko but in the 1670s Behn probably heard of a betrayed ‘African king’ on display in Oxford. She declared that she began her play, The Young King, the ‘first essay of my infant-poetry’, in Surinam; based on French and Spanish sources and saturated with romantic conventions of feminine love and masculine heroics, it was published much later, in 1683.

Behn was not the only avid reader of romance in colonial Surinam. When Byam sent his reports to England he used names from the popular French fiction L’Astrée to refer to his subjects. Aphra Behn became the heroine ‘Astrea’, a name she was to use all her life, and a William Scot became her lover ‘Celadon’.

Scot was the son of ‘Cromwell’s Intelligencer’ (the phrase comes from Pepys), a regicide later executed by Charles II. He was a lawyer much in demand by the authorities in England, from which he had fled; with his cavalier style and Puritan past – a feature of many of the men connected with the royalist Aphra Behn – Scot was watched by Byam as a possible troublemaker in the politically factious and volatile colony. But all Byam apparently saw was a flirtation with the young Aphra, after whom he believed ‘Celadon’ might have gone in pursuit when a passage home was finally arranged for the bereaved family.

On her lengthy way to or from England Aphra may have visited Virginia, to which ships frequently sailed carrying sugar from Surinam. This was the setting of her posthumously published work The Widow Ranter, the first English play to be set in the American colonies. Perhaps she wrote from memory of a short stay in North America or perhaps she travelled there later; alternatively the vulgar, litigious and misgoverned society described in the play may have been based on Surinam itself, which Willoughby in 1664 called ‘that poor and sad colony’ and whose government was described in Oroonoko as consisting of ‘such notorious villains as Newgate never transported, and possibly originally were such, who understood neither the laws of God or man’.

Whatever her Atlantic route, Aphra eventually arrived back in England where she gave some butterflies to ‘His Majesty’s Antiquaries’ and a set of Indian feathers to the King’s Company of players under Thomas Killigrew; the feathers were mentioned in Oroonoko, to whose events they would later give tangible and historical validity, and they were probably used in a revival of The Indian Queen by Robert Howard and John Dryden.