Usually, however, the narrator is a watcher and a listener, a recipient of gossip and news, commonsensical in her comments, but not omniscient and not able to deliver poetic justice in place of real-life happening or to provide a simple and single version of people and events. Miranda, the fair jilt, seems attractive and vivacious on the one hand and on the other lewd, criminal and grasping; she avoids moral justice and lives to be happy after her appalling crimes. The good Oroonoko dies to the stench of the rotting corpse of his once-beautiful bride Imoinda. Like the earlier black Othello whom he occasionally resembles, he lives in the mode of heroic drama but, like Tarquin, he cannot achieve the heroic death, suffering instead the grotesque realism of mutilation. In the next century women would come to write almost entirely in the sentimental mode, presenting themselves as feeling and morally impeccable ladies; the apparent amorality of Behn as well as her physicality, whether displayed in erotic verse or in descriptions of bodily mutilation, would become deeply shocking to readers and impossible for women writers to imitate.

The closest analogy to Behn’s narrator is the spectator at the theatre and indeed there is much that is theatrical in her fiction. The characters themselves seem to know the dramatic conventions they should follow; the fair jilt Miranda plays to her advantage the conventional stage role of victimized woman when she is in fact the sexual aggressor; even Oroonoko is aware when to make the heroic speech, echoing Bacon, the hero of The Widow Ranter, who speaks in a poetic style in a world of prose. Both men who resign empire for love in the manner of heroic drama of the early Restoration appear to be characters out of an older dramatic mode, adrift in rather sordid comedies of later debased social manners. Baroque writers frequently saw the world as theatre and Behn is true to this vision when her narrators present love, religion and law in terms of drama. The law court, the altar and the scaffold all become places of spectacle and show.

While never declaring for atheism, Behn seems to have shared the libertine belief in the aesthetic or unified moment. Royalism and Catholicism were frequently presented as style in her works and she experienced to the full the public ritual moments of church and state. Love too seemed best when it shut out the sense of time and consequence and was accompanied by art, music and wine. Not for her an existence in which ‘life but dully lingers on’.

Perhaps the intense moments were little shards from the golden age scattered in the dreary years of party politics and money-grubbing. If so, there were fewer of them as she entered her final year. As the new leaden age of William and Mary dawned it found Behn at a low ebb, poor, ill and disillusioned. The last poem she saw through publication in March 1689 expressed the predicament of a woman who openly declared she wrote for money and who should therefore have gone on trimming with the times, but who found in the end that her muse was surprisingly ‘stubborn’. Her ‘Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet’, a man fiercely opposed to Stuart pretensions, the reputed converter of the dying Rochester and one-time denigrator of Aphra Behn herself as a woman ‘abominably vile’, was a reply to a request from Burnet for a poem in support of the new king, William of Orange. The eulogy could not be delivered and the ambiguous ‘Pindaric’, at once satirical and sincere, conventional and personal, gives the reason why not. Behn died a few days after Burnet preached the sermon at William’s coronation.

In 1678 in her address to the reader of Sir Patient Fancy, Aphra Behn had insisted that she was bawdy because other playwrights were so, that plays were frequently trivial and that she wrote them only for bread. By the end of her life she had clearly come to a juster appreciation of her own art and achievement. In the prologue to The Lucky Chance, printed nearly a decade later, when she again defended herself against the charge of bawdiness, she did not repeat the point about the triviality of her business or again claim lack of interest in fame. Indeed she now regarded herself as an author of some talent who did not write only for money on the third day (the receipts for the third theatrical performance traditionally went to the playwright). She wished to remain known for this talent, despite the conventional contempt for her sex:

… had the plays I have writ come forth under any man’s name, and never known to have been mine; I appeal to all unbiased judges of sense, if they had not said that person had made as many good comedies, as any one man that has writ in our age; but a devil on’t the woman damns the poet… All I ask, is the privilege for my masculine part, the poet in me (if any such you will allow me), to tread in those successful paths my predecessors have so long thrived in… If I must not, because of my sex, have this freedom, but that you will usurp all to yourselves; I lay down my quill, and you shall hear no more of me, no, not so much as to make comparisons, because I will be kinder to my brothers of the pen than they have been to a defenceless woman; for I am not content to write for a third day only. I value fame as much as if I had been born a hero; and if you rob me of that, I can retire from the ungrateful world, and scorn its fickle favours.

She did not retire and her muse, as the ‘Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet’ reveals, was stubborn and demanding to the end.

JANET TODD

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF
SECONDARY WORKS

Brown, Laura, ‘The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves’, in The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987).

Cameron, William J., New Light on Aphra Behn (Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 1961, reprinted 1978).

Cotton, Nancy, Women Playwrights in England c. 1363–1750 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980).

Duffy, Maureen, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn 1640–89 (London: Cape, 1977).

Gallagher, Catherine, ‘Who was that masked woman? The prostitute and the playwright in the comedies of Aphra Behn’, in Last Laughs, ed. Regina Barreca (New York: Gordon & Breach, 1988), pp. 23–42.

Goreau, Angeline, Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (New York: Dial, 1980).

Greer, Germaine, Introduction to The Uncollected Verse of Aphra Behn (Stump Cross: Stump Cross Books, 1989).

Guffey, George, ‘Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: Occasion and Accomplishment’, in Two English Novelists (Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1975).

Hume, Robert D., ‘Diversity and Development in Restoration Comedy, 1660–1679’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 5, 1972, pp. 365–97.

McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

Mendelson, Sara Heller, The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies (Brighton: Harvester, 1987).

O’Donnell, Mary Ann, Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986).

Pearson, Jacqueline, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642–1737 (London: Harvester, 1988).

Spencer, Jane, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

Todd, Janet, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989).

—, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (London: André Deutsch, 1996; Pandora, 1999).

Woodcock, George, The Incomparable Aphra (London: Boardman, 1848).

NOTE ON THE TEXT

Except in the case of Love-Letters to a Gentleman which is taken from an edition of 1700, I have used as the basis for this volume the first printed version of Aphra Behn’s plays and prose works. Her poems are mainly printed from Poems on Several Occasions (1684), a volume over which she appears to have had some control. In the case of a few poems, this collection represents the second printing: ‘The Disappointment’ first appeared in 1680 in the Earl of Rochester’s Poems on Several Occasions; ‘To Mr Creech… on his Excellent Translation of Lucretius’ was first printed in 1683 in Thomas Creech’s work; ‘Love Armed’ was included in Abdelazar in 1677.