A Restoration Lady of Letters

...She was seeking to claim her rightful place in the literary world of late 17th-century London, and to make distinctions between men and women in professional terms seemed to her arbitrary and unjust...

...He argued, as Goreau notes, "that Aphra never went to Surinam at all, but copied her description of the colony from a contemporary account...

...Behn and her times...

...Her pioneering role as the first successful female professional writer has been recognized...

...Each of us who has written full-length books on Aphra Behn has in fact adopted it...

...We have added to the biographical material a critical commentary on her writings, and have attempted to create a panorama of the Restoration world as it might impinge on a woman trying to liberate herself by indulging in the fashionable libertinism...

...I acknowledged her trail-blazing feminist role, pointed out her importance in the history of the English novel, and argued contra Bernbaum, in favor of accepting her own and her friends' reports of her life...

...that no Mr...

...The richness of personality that led to this 17th-century woman's friendships with the Earl of Rochester and Thomas Otway and mad Nathaniel Lee has been appreciated...

...The mysteries surrounding Aphra's early life, her involvement in international intrigue (a warning she sent that the Dutch intended a surprise attack on the English fleet was disregarded with disastrous results), and her gallant effort to sustain herself by her pen in a largely hostile male literary environment also have combined to make her something of a present-day cult figure...

...Behn had ever existed...

...For if Aphra's genealogy is to begin in the lives of her foremothers, it is among the shadowy figures of the unremembered women...

...All one can really say for Angeline Goreau is that she has delved more deeply than the rest of us into records revealing the lives of 17th-century women who did not become free or famous...

...This reconstruction forces us into a new kind of biography-an archaeology of the passed over, the stillborn...

...In 1948 this reviewer published The Incomparable Aphra, a full-length book on Mrs...

...Goreau does notice the book's existence in a seven-line footnote, but she never acknowledges how far her findings and those of Duffy overlap...

...Most important of all, Aphra Behn's place in English literature has been established...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "The Writer and Politics," "Anarchism," and "The Canadians" Aphra Behn has by now come into her own...

...A lively if uneven Restoration dramatist, her considerable list of plays is seen to include a couple of minor masterpieces (The Rover and The Widow Ranter), her lyric poetry retains a niche in the New Oxford Book of English Verse, and her novel Oroon-oko has finally been accorded classical status as a fictional experiment predating Defoe and Richardson...

...Explicit here is the argument that because Aphra was first in a succession, the original professional woman-of-letters, she did not share the tradition her male contemporaries saw themselves working in, and therefore we have to look at the aborted careers of the women who were her true precursors...

...From the shards that remain of women's lives, from letters, from sermons, from etiquette books and anecdotes, we gradually piece together what it must have been like for Aphra to be a woman in the 17th century...

...As for the approach Goreau boasts about-that of reconstructing "the collective experience in order to distinguish Aphra as an individual"-it turns out to be a variant of the standard "Life and Times" method...

...For almost 70 years now various writers have sought to do justice to Aphra...

...Then in 1977, as I have said, Maureen Duffy's The Passionate Shepherdess appeared, based partly on sources I had not been able to consult and offering as much factual material about Aphra's life as we are likely to have...

...In 1913, the same year Bernbaum's essay appeared, Montague Summers published a six-volume edition of Aphra Behn's Works with an informative, sympathetic introduction and useful notes...

...There is little excuse for this failure to come to terms with a contemporary rival biography...

...Let me detail some of the key events in the actual reconstruction of Aphra...

...The title of Goreau's book, however, begs a question: Is Aphra really in need of reconstruction...

...Her adventures as a settler in Surinam and a spy in the Netherlands for His Majesty Charles II's secret service, which scholars once said was lying boastfulness, have been authenticated...

...In 1927 Victoria Sackville-West came out with a brief biography, Aphra Behn, written from an admiring, distinctly feminist viewpoint and setting down all the facts known at the time...

...In declaring the need for "a new kind of biography-an archaeology of the passed over, the stillborn," Goreau further suggests that until she came along to do her "reconstructing," Aphra Behn had been virtually unrecognized...

...Although this tells us nothing we did not already know of Aphra's life, and offers no new critical perceptions on her works, it does deepen our sense of what an ordinary woman's existence must have been like in an earlier age of sexual revolution when men liberated themselves (as some of them still do) at the expense of women...

...The implication is reinforced by the lengthy account preceding the paragraph quoted above, which tells how during the 18th and 19th centuries Aphra was systematically underestimated as a writer and denigrated as a personality by a host of puritanical critics...

...But the impression given that Reconstructing Aphraopens up a completely new view is quite unfounded...

...It was as a feminist heroine that she appeared three years ago in The Passionate Shepherdess, a biography by the English writer Maureen Duffy, and that she is cast in Reconstructing Aphra by the American author Angeline Goreau...

...Except for one-line entries in Goreau's bibliography and some brief footnotes that give no idea of the importance of the efforts mentioned, though, the reader is led to assume that her undertaking is wholly original and daring...

...Behn's Biography a Fiction...

...Even Aphra's own revelations about her life and the statements of her friends, it is observed, were labeled lies in critiques like the notorious essay Ernest Bernbaum produced in 1913, entitled "Mrs...

...It is indeed true that Aphra Behn had a bad press from her early death in 1689 down to Professor Bernbaum's strictures in 1913...

...The author's affirmative answer is contained in the following key passage: "The text of Aphra Behn's life, then, cannot be understood outside the context of her feminine status: Her biographer must reconstruct the collective experience in order to distinguish Aphra as an individual...

...But this ignores the fact that, like many subsequent notable women writers, she did not see herself set apart...

...and that Aphra never warned the King of the Dutch attack on the English fleet when she was a spy...