Who was Aphra Behn? A look at a trailblazing 17th-century poet, writer, spy

A dramatist, poet and one-time spy, Aphra Behn wrote of gender-fluidity in liquid verse, crafted takedowns of slavery in prose, and inspired the likes of Virginia Woolf. But her extraordinary life and work remain little-known.

Some say this is because she was a woman; others because she lived in the Shakespearean era, a period that left little room for other writers. It didn’t help that she was declared scandalous in her own time, and faded from the mainstream.

Interestingly, she has been mourned, quietly but over centuries, as a forgotten treasure.
In the 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, Woolf wrote: “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”
Behn’s early plays, mainly tragicomedies, were commercially successful, at a time when few women made a living selling their words.
Her work was also critically acclaimed. Among academics, she is best known for the short novel Oroonoko (1688), which tells of the enslavement of an African prince by the captain of an English ship. For this tale, she drew on observations from her time in the Dutch colony of Suriname in South America.
Born in Canterbury in 1640, Behn moved to South America in 1663 but returned in a year to be married to a merchant. By 1666, she was sent off to the Netherlands, as a spy for the court of King Charles II.
She returned to England and began to write. Her first play (she would eventually write at least 19), was The Forc’d Marriage (1671), a comedy of errors involving disguises, mistaken identities and a woman who did not wish to marry.
A more layered work, The Rover, would follow in 1677. Set in a contemporary Spanish colony, it followed the adventures of a group of Englishmen and women, with a focus on how differently the two genders perceived and pursued love.
Her most scandalous work, the three-volume epistolary novel Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684), was loosely based on a real-life scandal between a politician and his aristocratic sister-in-law. It was works such as this one that led her to be tagged scandalous, and fade from the mainstream.
She continued to write as she saw fit. Gender-fluidity featured in a 1688 poem, To the Fair Clarinda:
In pity to our Sex sure thou wer’t sent,
That we might Love, and yet be Innocent:
For sure no Crime with thee we can commit;
Or if we shou’d – thy Form excuses it.
Behn died in 1689, aged 48, and is buried at Westminster Abbey.
Since 2021, local organisations such as A is for Aphra and The Aphra Behn Society have been lobbying for a memorial statue in Canterbury. They also organise exhibitions, plays, walks and festivals in her name.
“She has a very original voice. It’s very sharp, witty… and she provides a specifically female perspective which is rare for the period,” Astrid Stilma, a lecturer and an activist in the cause, said in a statement.
She remains an unfamiliar name to most fans of English literature.