As Jane Spencer in her introduction to Aphra Behn’s plays for Oxford University Press (Oxford, 1995) makes clear, the writer’s `colourful and mysterious life has swallowed up attention at the expense of her writing.’ Born circa 1640, records of her life while she was living it are sparse, patchy and for some periods non-existent. It doesn’t help that she went under names that range from Astrea, Agent 160, or Ann Behn. Accounts of her life posthumously added to the intrigue rather than clearing much up. From birth to death, she figures as an enigma. Her work is the most tangible thing about her.
She seems to have been born in or near Canterbury, the native city of that other great but much better documented enigma Christopher Marlowe. According to Spenser, her surname was probably Johnson. She may have been born Eaffry, child of Bartholomew and Elizabeth Denham, a barber and a wet nurse respectively. This story, as with Marlowe’s, gives her the ability to transcend a humble background and become an important cultural and social figure. But it is possible she was Aphra, whose mother was the illegitimate daughter of Lady Mary Sidney Worth. Whoever she was the offspring of, she was certainly born in Kent – that much is clear from consensus in her early biographies, though they differ between Wye, Sturry and Canterbury as the specific place. That is why it is easiest to settle this by simply saying Canterbury or the environs.
From the very beginning, her life is enshrouded in shadows. She may have gone to Surinam (at the time the English colony under Francis Willoughby on the south coast of South America, but taken over by the Dutch in 1667, and ran as a part of their own colonial empire till the 20th century, when it became the independent Republic of Suriname). In `Oronooko’ her novella published in 1688, she writes of the eponymous Africa prince tricked into slavery and sent to the colony. `I was myself an eye-witness to a great part of what you will find here set down,’ her narrator declares at the start of the book, `and what I could not be witness of I received from the mouth of the chief actor in this story’ (`Oroonoko’, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994, 6). But as with the work of the slightly later Daniel Defoe, taking this use of first person address and of an almost documentary, factual-sounding approach as any guarantee at all that most of the information being relayed is not fictional would be a mistake. In her life she seems to have disregarded strict boundaries between who she was and was not. The same therefore must apply to her work.
From 1664, it seems she was back in Britain, and soon after this assumed the name Mrs Behn. Her husband may have been a Dutch merchant – or the name might have been assumed, and she was never married at all. For Charles the Second she accepted an assignment to spy in Antwerp on the Dutch, and in particular on William Scott. His warning about an imminent invasion attempt went unheeded, and it seems she went unpaid for her work and was tried for debt once back in Britain, though no records show if she was ever imprisoned for this. Silence falls until 1670, when plays like `The Forc’d Marriage’ (1670) started to appear – she was to produce at least 18 other works for the stage. Of these, the most popular in her life were `The Rover’ (1673).
The tumult over the succession to Charles the Second on his death, and whether this should be protestant or Catholic proved her loyalty to the cause of the latter. She expressed disdain for Whigs, and huge dedication to the House of Stuart. She was arrested after publicly attacking Charles’s illegitimate son, a protestant, a case of loyalty being seen to go too far. In the next few years she fell silent. Her final years were dominated by ill health and poverty, though she continued to write, translate and see her work performed.
Behn’s attempts at concealment and obscurity partly meant that on her death, her work fell into a long period of neglect. Another reason was that much of what she produced seemed to go against the more straight laced social mores and habits of following times. In this, she suffered a similar fate of the even more flagrant John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who she seems to have been associated with, and who was also largely forgotten till much later. But the fluidity of her identity and the unsettling questions of allegiance and loyalty that her work raised strung a chord in the 20th century, and figures like Virginia Woolf championed her. Added to the quality of her work was the fact that as someone who managed to support herself with her own creative work, Behn was seen as a trailblazer for gender equality long before its time. Fascinating with her life story grew. Her works became better known. Fittingly, in 2019, an exhibition in the city either within which or close to which she was born held an exhibition of her work alongside that of Joseph Conrad and Christopher Marlowe. But while the parts of the exhibition addressing their biographies and creations were at least able to present a great deal of specific events and objects from their lives, hers was largely focussed on her books, because she left such a faint trace as an actual person. To paraphrase Christopher Wren’s famous inscription in St Paul’s, London, `If you seek his monument, look around,’ for Behn one pretty much has to seek her in her works, and on her own terms, because not much about her exists elsewhere. A fitting tribute for someone who seems, despite all the odds, to have lived her life very much as she wanted to, no matter what the costs. She dies in 1689.