![]() ![]() ![]() In her day, Behn had the reputation of a respected professional writer and also of a “punk-poetess.” For a long time after her death, she was allowed only to be the second.īeyond her successes on the stage and in fiction, Aphra Behn was a Royalist spy in the Netherlands and probably South America. (And in our frank and feminist era Behn can still astonish with her mocking treatment of sexual and social subjects like amorphous desire, marriage and motherhood.) During the two more respectable or prudish centuries that followed her death in 1689, women were afraid of her toxic image and mostly unwilling to emulate her sexual frankness. No woman would have such freedom again for many centuries. Behn was a lyrical and erotic poet, expressing a frank sexuality that addressed such subjects as male impotence, female orgasm, bisexuality and the indeterminacies of gender. For it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” Minds and bodies. The novelist Virginia Woolf wrote, “All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn. The most prolific dramatist of her time, she was also an innovative writer of fiction and a translator of science and French romance. Aphra Behn was the first English woman to earn her living solely by her pen. ![]()
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