Poems of the Week: Aphra Behn

Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941), in her long essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) described the status of women and the difficulties encountered by women writers in a man’s world. In it, she says:

"All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she--shady and amorous as she was--who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits."

Aphra was born in July, 1640, probably in Harbledown, a small town near Canterbury in the county of Kent in England. According to the Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature her origin is still a mystery: couple named Amis had a child named Aphra, who is often quoted as the poet, but it turns out that this Aphra died a short while after her birth. However, another source says that Aphra Johnson was the second daughter of Bartholomew Johnson and Elizabeth Denham, baptized Dec. 14 at Harbledown. The same source indicates that she was in Surinam in the period 1663 – 1664, returning to England, where she married a merchant named Behn. Once again, there is a significant difference with Merriam-Webster, who suggest that she married Behn in 1658, and that he died in the mid 1660s. Another source gives the date of her return to England from Surinam as ‘between 1658 and 1663’ and says that she was married Behn, but widowed after only thee years of marriage. It seems likely that she returned to England in 1658, since that was the date that Surinam was handed over to the Dutch. And given her subsequent activities, it is equally likely that her husband died, throwing her onto her own resources in an effort to make a living.

She had entered court circles (as they say), and was employed by King Charles II as a spy in Antwerp during the war against the Dutch (1665 – 1667). Her code name was ‘Astrea’ or Agent 160. According to one of the biographies of her, in this role “she successfully accomplished the objects of her mission; and in the latter end of 1666 she wormed out of one Van der Aalbert the design formed by De Ruyter, in conjunction with the DeWitts, of sailing up the Thames and burning the English ships in their harbours. This she communicated to the English court, but although the event proved her intelligence to have been well founded, it was at the time disregarded. Disgusted with political service, she returned to England.”

In 1668 she was sent to debtor’s prison for debts she had incurred in the service of the crown. The chronology I found on the web says that she was ‘probably released shortly thereafter’, but as with so much of her life, there appear to be no details.

However, things changed very soon after. In 1670, her first play, The Forced Marriage, was produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields by the Duke’s Company (we have described the companies and the theaters in London in our earlier article on Ben Jonson, although that was concerned with some fifty years earlier). The play was a great success, and ran for six nights. At the time, the practice was that if a play ran for three days, the income for the third day belonged to the author: Aphra thus received two days takings for this run, and this appears to have been the first payment to a woman for writing, certainly in England.

The first woman writer, so far as we know, was probably Sappho, in approximately 612 BCE, and some of her poems, or at least fragments of them, have been quoted here before. At first, I had some difficulty identifying other women writers prior to Aphra Behn, although one or two have been quoted here before. However, I then found an excellent source: A Celebration of Women Writers, edited by Mary Mark Ockerbloom. The following are a few names, drawn from this very considerable list.

The Japanese poet Ise No Go (875 – 939) (there are other ways of writing her name) was described as one of the “thirty-six poetic geniuses of Japan”. She wrote mainly in the brief Tanka form: here is an example:

That wild geese depart
ignoring the arrival
of the springtime haze---
is it because they dwell
in realms where flowers never bloom?

Perhaps the most famous woman writer world wide is ‘Lady Murasaki’, more properly Murasaki Shikibu. Details about her and her life are not really known. She lived in a time in Japan when the woman held a low position in society, and because of this, the exact date that she was born is not known. It is thought that she was born around 973 CE and that she died around 1025 Her real name is not known either; during this time period only the emperor's wife's real name and birth date were known. The Shikibu name comes from her father's position at court, and the name Murasaki is that of the principal female figure in her book, The Tale of Genji, which is the first novel not only of Japanese literature, but of literature in general. It is considered to be one of the greatest and earliest novels in the world. She also wrote poetry, again primarily in a short form; here is a well-known example:

Who will read it?
Who will live forever
In this world?
A letter left behind
In her undying memory.

Here is an exchange between Genji and Murasaki, From Chapter 23, when Genji and Murasaki have been together for almost 20 years and their relationship has survived his exile and his ongoing affairs with other women. Sitting alone with Murasaki, Genji says:

at last the thin ice
has melted from the pond
the mirror reflects
an image unequaled in
these times of two side by side.

And Murasaki replies, extending the image to past and future:

how clear it is
in the mirror of the pond
these images of
ten thousand generations
which remain vivid forever

The next woman writer of distinction, so far as I can tell, was Héloise (c. 1098 – 1164 CE). She was a highly educated young woman when her legendary correspondence with the philosopher Peter Abelard (1079 – 1142) began. Peter the Venerable stated, upon the occasion of Abelard's death, that Héloise was a woman "wholly devoted to philosophy in the true sense," who "left logic for the Gospel, Plato for Christ and the academy for the cloister."

The next name I have found, and the first English woman writer, was Juliana of Norwich (c. 1342 - c.1443). She was an English religious writer, an anchoress, or hermit, of Norwich called Mother (or Dame) Juliana or Julian. Her work, completed c.1393, Revelations of Divine Love, is an expression of mystical fervor in the form of 16 visions of Jesus. Dominant ideas are the great love of God for men and the detestable character of human sin. She is considered one of the greatest English mystics and was writing at the same time as Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 – 1400).

At more or less the same time, a woman named Margery Brunham, born in Lynn around 1373, married John Kempe, and they had fourteen children; there is no indication how many of them survived. When she was about 35 she had a visionary experience and felt that she had been "called from the pride and vanity of this wretched world." She began to live an ascetic life and tried to avoid sexual relations with her husband. It took about five years, but John Kempe eventually agreed to their living together without sexual contact.

In about 1413, aged about 40, Margery Kempe began the travels that, with her ongoing visionary experiences, make up her Book. Her trips were pilgrimages, either to spots considered holy or to people who would confirm that her way of life - her kind of asceticism, her apparently uncontrollable need to pray and weep aloud - was in fact pleasing to God, if not to her neighbors or the clergy of Lynn.

At first she visited the bishop of Lincoln, the archbishop of Canterbury, and Juliana of Norwich. From the autumn of 1413 to the summer of 1415, she was on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Rome. In the summer of 1417, she was a pilgrim at Santiago de Compostela in Spain; on her way home she went to York and London.

During the 1420's Margery remained at home in Lynn. At some point her husband became ill, and she nursed him for several years before his death in 1431. Also during this period, "twenty years and more from the time that this creature first had feelings and revelations," a scribe began to write down Margery's story as she told it to him. After the first scribe died, Margery took her book to a priest, but because of her local reputation, he put off working with her on revising the book for some four years.

In 1433 she went on a pilgrimage to Norway and Germany; this trip would become the subject of the second part of her Book. By 1436, the priest-scribe had completed his revision (under Margery's strict supervision) of the 89-chapter Book 1; two years later he and Margery wrote the 10-chapter Book 2. Margery is mentioned in the records of Lynn in 1439; after that we know nothing of her. So far as I can tell, she never wrote any poetry!

Vittoria Collona (1490 – 1547) was the Marchesa di Pescara. She was born into one of the major noble families of Rome. When she was 3 years old, she was betrothed to the Marquis of Pescara, two years older than she; the marriage took place in Naples when she was 17. The couple had about one year together before Pescara left Naples for northern Italy to join Vittoria's father in fighting for Spain and the pope against the French. Except for brief truces, the fighting continued for 15 years, so Pescara was seldom home. In 1525, the French were finally defeated, but Pescara died of wounds received in the last battle.

During her marriage, Colonna spent most of her time at her home in Naples, where, childless herself, she raised her husband's young cousin. She did, however, often travel to Rome and her family home, where she became friends with the leading poets of the period; one of these, the neo-Petrarchan Pietro Bembo (1470 – 1547), apparently became her mentor as she began to write poetry. As she grew older, a friendship begun in the 1530s with Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475 – 1564) grew through visits and letters. The artist wrote several poems to and about Colonna. At least one drawing of Colonna is by Michelangelo (see online), and several of his images of Mary are believed to be based on her appearance. He was with her when she died.

At least one of Colonna's extant poems was written before Pescara's death, but the great majority are from after 1525. They circulated individually, and a collection in manuscript was sent to Marguerite of Navarre and to others. In 1538, her first collection was printed, and another in 1546, both apparently without her permission. The modern edition of her Rime contains 390 poems: 141 love poems, most written between 1526 and the early 1530's; 217 spiritual poems, mostly from the 1530s and 1540s; and 32 epistolary poems.

Here is a sonnet of hers. The translator has not attempted to reproduce the rhyme scheme, which would have been that of a Petrarchan sonnet:

If I too seldom take in hand the file
Of sober judgment, and searching around
With haughty eye, do not put forth the pains
To beautify and polish my rough rhymes,
This is because my prime concern is not
To seek for praise or to escape from scorn,
Nor that, when I have fled joyful to heaven,
My verse should live on earth with high regard.

If from the holy fire that lights my mind
By grace of God, there should come forth such sparks
Almost despite myself, that later may
Perchance bring warmth to gentle loving hearts
Who turn to reading them one day---a thousand
And thousand times I'll thank my happy error.

Aphra Behn continued to write plays, and really this is what her fame really depended on. Her most successful play was The Rover, which was produced in March 1677, and published in the same year. Nell Gwyn (1650 – 1687) came out of retirement to take the part of the whore Angelica Bianca. After John Dryden (1631 – 1700), she was the most prolific dramatist of the Restoration; but it is her pioneering work in prose narrative that has assured her place in literary history.

Her masterwork was Oroonoko; or the History of the Royal Slave, published in 1688. This is set in Surinam, and some sources suggest that it is based directly on her own experiences, and that the eponymous hero was a real person that she had met there. The book may be summarized as follows: Oroonoko, grandson of an African chief and educated by a European tutor, is captured and taken in a slave ship to the colony of Surinam. The colonists see his "greatness of courage and mind", and give him the name Caesar. His face is "of perfect ebony, or polished jet. His eyes ... very piercing"; he has "no one grace wanting that bears the standard of true beauty." On the ship, Oroonoko would have starved himself to death, rather than submit to slavery, and others follow him in this — so the captain, in fear for his cargo, convinces Oroonoko he will be freed. In the colony he is again assured freedom — but is told he must wait till the Lord-Governor comes from England. Oroonoko marries and his wife is going to have a child; they fear the child is wanted for a slave too, so he goes to rouse the other slaves, and leads them in rebellion. The novel ends with Oroonoko being tortured and burned for leading the rebellion — her description is unflinching, unbearable, and yet brave in showing how he never debased himself, never allowed his tormentors to have contempt for him. Her wanting to get within the soul of this man and these men and oppose so keenly the brutal, entrenched contempt of white for Black — represents the true triumph of her art. Here is her description of Orinooko:

“I have often seen and conversed with this great man, and been a witness to many of his mighty actions; and do assure my reader, the most illustrious courts could not have produced a braver man, both for greatness of courage and mind, a judgment more solid, a wit more quick, and a conversation more sweet and diverting. He knew almost as much as if he had read much: he had heard of and admired the Romans: he had heard of the late Civil Wars in England, and the deplorable death of our great monarch; and would discourse of it with all the sense and abhorrence of the injustice imaginable. He had an extreme good and graceful mien, and all the civility of a well-bred great man. He had nothing of barbarity in his nature, but in all points addressed himself as if his education had been in some European court.”

This book has been regarded as the first in the tradition of what is called “The Noble Savage” for which Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) is generally credited, at least for the philosophical basis. Actually, I do not think that this book corresponds at all to this idea: it is important to realize that Behn’s picture of Oroonoko is of a noble person, albeit of a different color; and I think the extract I have included above makes this clear. One should remember that Shakespeare’s Othello has a personality defect, perhaps; but in no sense is he presented as a savage.

Behn also wrote an epistolatory novel, Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister, (1683) which is the first major epistolatory novel in English literature.

However, this column is primarily about poetry, and of course Aphra Behn wrote poetry! Her first collection, Poems on Several Occasions was published in 1684; another collection, Miscellany appeared in 1685.

In discussing her poetry, one must think about her background and the status of the poets of the time. Increasingly, poets were expected to have a considerable knowledge of the works of the great poets: the literary renaissance had arrived in England with Sir Philip Sidney (1554 – 1586), and poets were expected to have a knowledge not only of the works of the poets in translation, but of the important works in the original. It is worth recalling that in his epitaph on Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), Ben Jonson (1573 – 1637) said of him:

And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seek

And the same might be said of Aphra Behn. It is clear from the opening to Oroonoko that she spoke French; and it seems likely that she spoke Dutch; but there is no indication that she had any knowledge of the classical languages.

Her French certainly seems to have been good: she translated Entretiens sur la La Pluralité des Mondes (1686), the most famous work of Bernard le Bovier, Sieur de Fontelle (1657 – 1757), as A Discovery of New Worlds, in 1688. Merriam-Webster says of Fontenelle’s work: “These charming and sophisticated dialogues were more influential than any other work in securing acceptance of the Copernican system. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1691.”

All of these aspects of Aphra Behn’s life – the lack of detailed knowledge of her birth, her background, her education – are related to a change that came between the Tudors, who respected the education of women, and valued their intellectual contributions (this is directly derived from the Renaissance), and the Stuarts, who to a large extent disapproved of the education of women – it has been said that this derived from the Scottish background of the Stuart monarchs. One factor was that records were kept by Oxford and Cambridge, and by the Inns of Court: these establishments excluded women at that time. While the ladies of the nobility did write poetry, for example, the women of even the relatively well-to-do families outside the nobility were not encouraged. For more details on this and the experience of women in 17th century England, read the excellent The Weaker Vessel, by Antonia Fraser (1984).

So: what can we choose to represent her poetry? The first is perhaps the most frequently quoted poem in recent web-based collections, To The Fair Clarinda. Its ambiguity is typical, and accounts for some of the animosity with which she was greeted during her life, and in the following half century or so. This was first published in her collection A Miscellany of New Poems by Several Hands (1688). The second is in the recent The New Penguin Book of English Verse, edited by Paul Keegan.  A Thousand Martyrs I Have Made. The last poem for this week is also in the Penguin collection: Love Armed. This first appeared as Love in fantastic triumph sat in Abdelazer (1677). It was reprinted in Poems on Several Occasions in 1684; the 1684 version is the one given here.

Mrs. Behn died on the 16th of April 1689, and was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, which, in view of her reputation at the time, is somewhat surprising.

John Hoyle (c. 1638 - 1692) was a Gray's Inn attorney, whose tempestuous affair with Aphra Behn lasted several years. He is believed to have written the epitaph on her black marble stone:

Here lies a proof that wit can never be
Defence enough against mortality.

Three years after her death, he was stabbed to death during a tavern brawl.