Aphra Behn, celebrated Restoration-era playwright, poet, and novelist, died in London, having built an unprecedented career as a professional woman writer in an era when few women published under their own names. Her novel Oroonoko, an early and influential fictional account of an enslaved African prince, and her many staged comedies made her one of the most prolific and commercially successful English dramatists of the 1670s and 1680s.
Before Behn, English women who wrote for money were a rarity bordering on scandal; writing was considered a gentleman's pursuit or, at best, an aristocratic woman's private hobby. Behn broke that mold entirely, supporting herself through play royalties in London's cutthroat Restoration theater scene, where she competed directly with male playwrights like Dryden for audiences and box office receipts.
Her earlier life remains murky and much debated, including claims she worked as a spy for Charles II's government in Antwerp during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, an episode that, true or embellished, added to her mystique. Oroonoko, published in 1688, dramatized the story of an enslaved African prince in Suriname and is frequently cited by literary historians as a foundational text of the English novel and an early literary engagement with slavery's horrors, decades before abolitionism became a mass movement.
Virginia Woolf later wrote that 'all women together ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn' for having earned women the right to speak their minds through writing. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, though not in Poets' Corner, a small slight that has not diminished her reputation as the first Englishwoman known to have earned her living by the pen.
Key people: Aphra Behn