Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra BehnThree hundred years ago, Aphra Behn became the first woman in England to earn her living by the pen, at a time when few women writers even dared to publish under their own names. She was so threatening a figure that her works disappeared into obscurity shortly after her death in 1689, and even the fact that she actually existed has been disputed. Now she surfaces again in Angeline Goreau's brilliant recreation of a life more exciting than any fiction. The true adventures of Aphra begin in 1663 with her arrival as an orphaned young woman in the colony of Surinam. There in that dangerous paradise she met the enslaved black prince Oroonoko, whose tragic history she was later to write in novel form. There as well she met William Scot, the spy who became her lover and whom she was to re-encounter in Antwerp, when she herself was spying for King Charles II. When spying proved economically hazardous for a woman with her own way to make in the world, Aphra turned to the pen -- writing the comedies that were then in fashion on the Restoration stage, vying in bawdiness with her male counterparts. She was part of the most brilliant circle of her time: Thomas Otway, the Earl of Rochester, and Nell Gwyn were her intimates, the beautiful and damned of the seventeenth century. Ahead of her era, and paying the price for it, Aphra was constantly plagued by public censure. She was pilloried by critics, who accused her of plagiary and help her up to scorn as "unfeminine" and -- what was even worse -- "immodest." Reconstructing Aphra from 17th-century documents -- and most of all from her plays, poems, and novels -- viewing her life in the context of what it meant to be female in the seventeenth century, Angeline Goreau gives us an important and original portrait of a woman who violated traditional roles and expectations in a world where sexual liberation was defined by male libertines. Aphra Behn's "double blind," the constant tension between "femininity" and autonomy that characterized her life and work, makes her a heroine for our own time. -- Book jacket. |
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