Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  Behn is a writer who has attracted misattributions: in her life as well as after her death. Indeed in the preface to The Luckey Chance she joked about the fact: people ‘charge me with all the Plays that have ever been offensive; though I wish with all their Faults I had been the Author of some of those they have honour’d me with’. For us now, three and a half centuries later, attribution of anonymous or posthumous works is notoriously difficult in this period. Male authors may impersonate women to enter the female bedroom, just as women may make themselves at home in the masculine spaces of the battle ground and council chamber. Much present academic work is busy shearing off items from established writers such as Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding

  The long tripartite novel Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–7) does not have Behn’s name on the title page, simply the initials A.B. These of course could simply suggest anonymity—or they could indicate Aphra Behn. She was named as the author of the work soon after her death and her authorship was accepted by those who commented on or reprinted this famous novel. Anyone with a scholarly interest in Behn will, on occasion, have vacillated over this ascription. But on the whole I stay with the attribution in the absence of any better competitor. The subject matter—the progress of a woman from a sheltered aristocrat to a renowned courtesan and the oscillation in her character between noblewoman and whore, as well as the attractiveness, absurdity and ultimately social power of the rake—is close to Behn’s concerns in all her genres, especially the plays and poems, where, too, she expresses enjoyment of energetic amorality. So too the politics, the Royalism that condemns the rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth against his uncle James II by trivialising the character and motives of the rebel. In addition, the work fits suitably into Behn’s life, appearing just when income from the theatre was drying up and when she was seeking to diversify her literary output. Leah Orr charges me with relying on ‘intuition and conjecture’ in my (guarded) acceptance of the attribution. I must plead guilty. I do believe Aphra Behn the likeliest candidate for authorship. And, if she didn’t write the novel, then there’s another remarkable fictionist out there to be discovered.

  Orr also accuses me of accepting the attribution to Behn of the posthumous short stories. Here I am not guilty. In the edition I included many works simply ascribed to Behn, so that scholars could make up their own mind. But I have never believed that all the posthumous short stories are by Behn, and I make this clear in the biography. As usual, I think the matter cannot be settled conclusively without some further exciting discovery, but I stay with my point, which many scholars have made and which Orr reiterates, that it is odd that Behn, with her chronic shortage of money, did not publish before her death so many stories later attributed to her.

  For textual and historical scholars, there is still much work to be done on Restoration attributions. It is best done in a tolerant spirit, since no scholarly moment has complete purchase on the truth. And, to quote Germaine Greer’s useful opinion: with Behn we have to be ‘prepared to live with what [we] don’t know’. Behn can be left a spectral presence, intentionally or unintentionally erased from literary history, or, from our own vantage and trapped in our own times, we can use what she left and make of her what we can through our (inevitably blinkered) eyes. In a note in The Muses Mercury of 1707 the suspicious reader is invited to ‘inspect’ Behn’s manuscripts ‘at the Booksellers’ and, if secrets could be told, receive ‘an unquestionable Proof of their being genuine’. I wish I could send out such an invitation.

  In the last two decades, I have shaken off what many biographers feel when they are writing and when they have just finished their work, what A. S. Byatt described in The Biographer’s Tale: a possessiveness about their subject. I have now become immersed in fiction far more than I had time to be in the 1990s and have grown ‘perhaps’ more indulgent to my earlier speculative, intuitive self.

  In Muriel Spark’s Loitering With Intent (1981), Fleur Talbot, an aspiring novelist, is employed by the Autobiographical Association to aid members in writing their memoirs: ‘Now that I come to write biographically,’ she remarks, ‘I have to tell of whatever actually happened and whoever naturally turns up. The story of a life is a very informal party; there are no rules of precedence and hospitality, no invitations.’ What and whoever turns up is a matter of chance, of literary fashion, and, yes, of pre-formed inclination and intuition. I tried to understand the phenomenon of Aphra Behn as best I could, and attempted to be as little blinkered as possible by the pride and prejudices of my own age. I am well aware that I trod in the steps of Aphra Behn’s earliest biographers, who took many of their ‘facts’ from her writings, her own and other people’s efforts at fashioning a saleable image. Fact and fiction are not easy to distinguish then or now, and Behn wrote faction long before the word was coined. I have given a possible narrative, while letting a reader see that other narratives are available. I doubt any one can do Behn ‘justice’ but all our biographies are, in their different ways, tributes.

  So, in short, what has emerged for me from a brief look at the fascinating criticism of twenty years is a sense of a writer still seen to be destabilising, a shape-shifter, an author who allows no easy response. Aphra Behn appears not so much the self-fashioner we found in the 1970s as a fashioner of selves. Over the decades she has benefited from many subtle and probing studies that aim to tease out her connections and views. All help us to realise more and more the exciting ambiguities and bracingly divergent opinions of this still most secretive of women, counterfeiters, and authors.

  For generous help with the revised edition, I should like to thank Katherine Bright-Holmes, Lisa Caprino, Maureen Duffy, Derek Hughes and Ken Moxham.

  Janet Todd, October 2016

  Acknowledgements

  It is good to be able to say that Aphra Behn scholars are of a ‘generous and open Temper’ and ‘very serviceable to their friends’, like their subject. Among many, I am especially grateful to Elizabeth Spearing for her support, friendship and help through all stages of this book, to Mary Ann O’Donnell for her extensive and detailed bibliographical work generously shared, and to Germaine Greer, whose critical, stimulating and astringent comments have been unfailingly helpful. Anyone working biographically on Aphra Behn must owe a great debt to Maureen Duffy for her biography, The Passionate Shepherdess (1977), which has laid the foundation for future work on Aphra Behn.

  I am deeply grateful to the following for their help: Jane Jones with Behn’s Kentish years; Dawn Lewcock with the staging of Behn’s plays; Sarah Barber with the background of George Marten; Sara Mendelson with Behn’s lodgings; Robert Hume with the dating of plays; Hilde van den Hooff, Marysa Demoor and J. P. Vanden Motten for help with research in Belgium; Keith Davey with naval vessels; John Loftis with Colonel Bampfield; Paul Hopkins with the Roger Morrice entering book; Dame Eanswythe Edwards of Stanbrook Abbey with Interregnum convents; Sharon Valiant with the Sidneys; and Melinda Zook with the 1680 Whigs.

  Over the years I have also benefited from conversations in person or by post with Jane Spencer, Ros Ballaster, Michael Harris, J. R. Jones, Cath Sharrock, Kathleen Lesko, Maureen Mulvihill, James Fitzmaurice, Virginia Crompton, Patricia Crawford, Alison Smith, Colin Davis, Francis McKee, Emma Rees, Lois Schwoerer, Deborah Payne, Margot Hendricks, Jessica Munns, Susan Hastings and Steven N. Zwicker, as well as the contributors to Aphra Behn Studies, Catherine Gallagher, Alison Shell, Susan J. Owen, Jacqueline Pearson, Joanna Lipking and Paul Salzman. In addition, I would like to thank James Lynn, Pamela Holt, Katherine Bright-Holmes and Diana Birchall for reading and commenting on parts of the manuscript.

  Among librarians I am grateful to Laetitia Yaendel of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, which provided me with a very timely fellowship, to Brian Jenkins at the Cambridge University Library Rare Books Room, to Virginia Renner at the Huntington Library, Pasadena, to Tania Styles of the Department of Manuscripts & Special Collections, University of Nottingham, and to the Librarians of the Bri
tish Library, Dr Williams’ Library, the Guildhall Library, the Corporation of London Records Office, the Public Record Office, the Westminster Abbey Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Brotherton Library, Leeds, the Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, the Canterbury Cathedral Archives, the Bodleian Library, the library of Worcester College Oxford, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, the Library of Congress, Washington, the Manuscript Library, the Beinecke Library, Yale University, and the state and city archives of The Hague, Antwerp, and Ghent. I am grateful to Viscount De L’Isle for permission to inspect the Sidney family archives.

  Introduction to the 1996 Edition

  ‘The writing a life is at all Times, and in all Circumstances the most difficult Task of an Historian But if the Difficulty be so great, where the Materials are plentiful, and the Incidents extraordinary; what must it be when the Person that affords the Subject, denies Matter enough for a Page.’1

  The playwright, poet, fictionist, propagandist and spy, Aphra Behn, born some time and somewhere before or during the Civil War and dying in 1689, 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. Secrecy is endemic to the Restoration, a period badly documented and given to covering traces when these traces hinted at complicated disloyalties; yet, for someone who became as famous as Aphra Behn, there is peculiarly little known. The secrecy conforms to her one certain activity: espionage.

  For documented authors, it is thought vulgar and unscholarly to plunder literary works to make a tale. The story of Aphra Behn, Ann Behn as she is sometimes called by contemporaries, Mrs Bean or Behn, Astrea as she wished to be known, European or American, aristocrat or plebeian, wife or whore, Catholic, Protestant or atheist, must, however, be constructed from the works, for there is almost nowhere else to search. Women are excluded from most institutions that keep records; the lists of county gentlemen do not include Aphra Behn, nor do the rolls of Oxford and Cambridge or of the Inns of Court and the Middle Temple, which contain a hearty number of her playwright colleagues.

  If she were firmly aristocratic, there would be a country seat to visit in hope of contemplating an oak which the child Aphra might have climbed, imagining long skirts rustling and dancing feet echoing. But she is not and there is no such house. Without it and without a great public school or college, or even a church or chapel fellowship, there is little chance that something startling will be found in an attic: a notebook or doodle that proves she was James II’s mistress or the daughter of a pastry cook from Barbados. Upper-class women might record some seemingly trivial aspect of domestic life and let it survive, a Quaker woman might note a movement of the soul. There is nothing similar for Aphra Behn. If she visited her family, the visit went unnoticed; if she bared her ‘soul’, it was in code.

  Since more conventional methods of characterisation are sparse—authenticated letters, diaries, other people’s analyses—the construction of a life must rely on the more dubious questioning of the fictional narrators, the speakers of her many poems, the voices of the plays, the prologues and epilogues, the repeated characters, themes and expressions, accepting that autobiography may be diffused through them and that memory is a main imaginative resource for artists, exploited in oblique ways. All Aphra Behn’s writings are rhetorical, all masks, all perspectives to be changed like clothes—but, like clothes, some were chosen, some inherited or given, some simply the fashion, and all may be expressive.

  Aphra Behn did not share our own century’s reverence for introspection. She regarded much talk of the inner life as a naïve Puritan habit followed by those of lower rank. As she did not see her general statements as universal truths, so her characterisations of her ‘self were never absolute but, rather, instrumental. For her, action and speech became a staging. The girl who grew up to be a spy, a playwright, political propagandist, and authority on love—when almost nothing is known for sure about her love life—and commentator on colonialism and race—when it remains uncertain whether or not she visited the colonies—must have had a sense of the self as performed, created, narrated and in writing. So a biography becomes another mask, inevitably formed in the culture of its moment from the writing of the past that has survived. Truth, as Behn came to think, was not necessarily empirical fact, but what was authorised by power, whether that power was divine, political, aesthetic or popular. She would expect to be what we make her, both out of what we take to be her writing and out of our desire to ‘know’ her. There can be many Aphra Behns, now as there probably were then.

  For the centuries after her death, Aphra Behn was simply regarded as a smutty writer, worse for being a woman. ‘Mrs Behn wrote foully; and this for most of us, and very properly, is an end of the whole discussion,’ said the booklover William Henry Hudson in 1897.2 Over a century of abuse and neglect prepared for this opinion; where, in different moods, her contemporaries Dryden, Rochester, Otway and Wycherley had appreciated her, the eighteenth-century fiction greats, Richardson and Fielding, vilified her as unwomanly. With this scorn, she shared the fate of the Restoration, or rather that small group of libertine and liberated courtiers and theatre people—never the majority of the population—who came to represent the Restoration for later ages. The group both scandalised its own times and sexually and politically haunted the next two centuries with its excess. Indeed Samuel Richardson might almost be seen as founding the eighteenth-century novel in horrified reaction to the Restoration and its corrupting theatre. As a woman, Behn was one of the scapegoats. ‘The stage how loosely does Astrea tread, / Who fairly puts all characters to bed!’ scoffed Alexander Pope in his Epistle to Augustus in 1735. Already in 1688 the conduct-book writer, the Marquis of Halifax, had remarked, ‘the unjustifiable Freedom of some of your Sex have involved the rest in the penalty of being reduced’.3 ‘The disgrace of Aphra Behn,’ declared the nineteenth-century critic Julia Kavanagh, ‘is that, instead of raising man to woman’s moral standard [she] sank woman to the level of man’s coarseness.’4 John Doran echoed the view: Behn dragged the Muses down to her level ‘where the Nine and their unclean votary wallowed together in the mire’.5

  In the early twentieth century, when woman’s unique moral standard was doubted, other aspects of the ‘ingenious Mrs. Behn’ came to the fore: that she was the first professional woman writer in England and, for the twenty years of her writing life, the only female playwright.6 Virginia Woolf understood the significance: ‘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.’ Unfortunately, the professional significance was so strong for Woolf that she lost sight of any literary merit. In this she was a woman of her time, for she wrote when literature was thought able to transcend its historical moment and when it had to refuse the contamination of politics. Romantic notions of art as self-expressing were not, however, current in the Restoration and men openly wrote for money and political purpose, as did Behn.

  The woman Virginia Woolf praised in Aphra Behn’s place was an invented one, a sister Judith for the great literary icon, the Renaissance William Shakespeare. Judith Shakespeare was a failed Romantic, a woman who grew suicidal under her injuries and did not even enter the stage door in her quest to write plays like her brother. Behn, who did enter, was reduced to a hack—her mind unfree because she wrote for money. She became a ‘middle-class woman with all the plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and courage; a woman forced by the death of her husband and some unfortunate adventures of her own to make her living by her wits’. The fact of her writing ‘outweighs anything that she actually wrote’.7 Here the very professionalism which prevented Behn from ending up suicidal kept her from the ranks of the great artists. Woolf overlooked the motive that persuaded Judith’s brother, William, to write.

  Since Virginia Woolf’s time, the Second Wave of feminism has washed over Aphra Behn. In this sh
e became the subject of two full biographies.8 Yet, in the 1970s, she was not much examined as a writer, for reasons clear in Woolf’s remarks: she did not conform to the notion of what a woman author should be, a suffering soul working against patriarchal oppression, in deep conflict with men. Behn acknowledged the conflict between the sexes, but felt both sides were deeply implicated in it. Patriarchy was all-enveloping, but it was a cultural construction in which everyone had some stake and share. She depicted herself as confident, engaged and knowing. There was no panoply of feminine shame or modesty, no sense that she wrote because impelled to express her female predicament. She wrote because she was good at it and made money.